THROUGH THE EYE OF A NEEDLE

HAL CLEMENT

(Sequel to NEEDLE)

Contents

1) Apology
2) Generalities
3) Details
4) Complications
5) Arrangements and People
6) When in Doubt, Ask
7) The Moral of a White Lie
8) Joke
9) Routine, Modified
10)

Joke Two

11)

Joke Three

12)

First Aid

13)

Joker

14)

Reconstruction

15)

Professional

16)

Official, from Headquarters

Apology
Everyone wants to make an impression on history, but most of us
would prefer it to be a good impression. Some twenty-eight years
ago, I wrote a story called NEEDLE, many of whose characters
reappear in this book. In that story, I frequently referred to one or
the other of the partners in the biological relation called symbiosis
as a symbiote. It will be obvious to many that I was never exposed
to a course in the classic tongues of Italy or Greece. A biology-
teaching colleague pointed out to me, gently and courteously but
much too late that the proper word is symbiont.
Unfortunately, my erroneous contribution to the language has
appeared quite frequently in other stories and even in their titles. I
regret this, but don't know what I can do about it except what I am
doing now. I formally withdraw the word, symbiote, and in this
book replace it with the proper one.
Those who still have hopes of formulating a science which will
describe social phenomena will, I trust, have fun observing the
results of this action.
If any.
Hal Clement

1. Generalities
Of the three people in the cockpit of the Catalina, one was
slightly bored, one was extremely uncomfortable but too
embarrassed to admit it, and the third was wondering whether he
had done the right thing.
The pilot had made the trip from Tahiti to Ell often enough and
had enough thousands of hours in the amphibian that little of his
conscious attention was needed for either operation or navigation.
The weather was bumpy but called for no special concern and the
aircraft itself was reliable enough to demand only the routine
worries of the man's profession.
Robert Kinnaird did not regard the weather with the same
indifference. He knew as well as the man in the other seat that
there was no danger, but the knowledge didn't seem to help his
nervous system at the reflex level. His eyes and his semicircular
canals were feeding conflicting data to his brain. The Pacific was
garnished with convection cells that afternoon; some of them were
visible by virtue of the cumulus puffs which topped them, but
others could only make themselves felt. The young man had
several times been on the verge of suggesting that they climb
above the cumulus tops, but he knew what the answer would be.
Dulac, the pilot, had very professional ideas about fuel
conservation, even on a short trip such as this. His combat flying
over the same ocean during the early forties had given him a clear
idea of the magnitude of the water-to-land ratio even in areas
where islands were frequent. Kinnaird himself had insisted on
making the flight that afternoon, rather than early the following
morning. Dulac had warned him that it would be a bumpy ride. All
that Bob could do was feel irritated at the third member of the
group, and he knew that any such annoyance was both unjustified
and futile. He had known for years that the Hunter would do
nothing about such a trivial phenomenon as motion sickness.
The Hunter himself was not quite sure whether he should take
steps or not. The flight was, of course, Bob's own fault; there was
no practical reason why they couldn't have waited until the next
day. The human youth knew, from both precept and experience
that his alien companion would do everything in his power to
preserve him from real injury or illness, but that he did not want to
encourage Bob to lean at all heavily on the being's invisible
presence. The four pounds of jelly distributed throughout the
man's body cavities knew that total dependence on another being
could lead to even more trouble than seven years of partial
dependence already had. The Hunter, these days, tended to lean
over backward to avoid doing anything more than basic scratch-

plugging. He knew that he was overreacting, and that a little nerve
pressure to ease his host's nausea would probably do no real
harm; but, with Bob's health at its present level, he could not bring
himself to take a chance. After all, the trip couldn't take much
longer.
In an attempt to be consoling, he pointed this out to Bob. The
pilot could not hear him, since the sound of the Hunter's voice
originated in his host's middle-ear bones, vibrated by threads of
unhuman tissues but the response was less well concealed.
"Don't tell me it wont be long!" snapped Kinnaird. "It's been
three and a half eternities already, and the island isn't in sight yet.
Why didn't you talk me out of it?" His voice was not quite audible,
though he did speak—the Hunter was not a mind-reader, though
he could interpret the emotion behind most of Bob's involuntary
muscular and glandular responses. The pilot might possibly have
heard the mutter if the engines had not been running.
"What was I supposed to say?" retorted the Hunter. "I did point
out that Dulac was right about the roughness of the flight. Since
you have final say about any of our activities—unless I want to
exercise veto by knocking you out—there was nothing much more
I could do. You chose to face it—now face it. After all, there's
nothing in your stomach to lose even if your control does go."
"I wish you'd exercise that veto right now. At least I'd be
comfortable until we get down. I mean it, Hunter. I've never felt
worse in my life. Maybe the other trouble is contributing, but I
really don't think I can put up with it any longer."
The Hunter was tempted for a moment, but decided against
taking the chance.
"This isn't that sort emergency, and you know it," the alien said.
"I'm sorry you're so uncomfortable, but no one ever dies of motion
sickness; as your own people say. They—"
"If you say what I think you're about to, I'll get drunk the minute
we get home!" Bob interrupted, almost loudly enough to attract
Dulac's attention. The Hunter, whose main aim was to keep his
host's attention from his own stomach, refrained from repeating the
cliché, and simply changed the subject. The remark about alcohol
he assumed—and hoped—was not meant seriously; Bob definitely
knew better than to take chances with his symbiont's personal
coordination.
"Do you really think we can get anywhere without letting more
human beings know about me?" the alien asked. "We're going to
need a lot of help."
"I'm hoping for most from Doc Seever," Bob replied. "His hours
are kind of irregular, of course, since there's no way to predict

sickness or injury there on the island, but he certainly knows more
of what has to be known than anyone else there. Dad'll be too
busy to help, most of the time. We really should have some people
who are either a lot lower in the PFI chain of command and don't
have much but eight-to-five responsibilities, or people who don't
work for the outfit at all. The latter will be hard to find on Ell."
"Your mother is a competent person."
"She'll have to spend too much time looking after Silly."
"Your sister is six years old, now. She shouldn't need very
much of your mother's time—won't she be in school by now?"
"Maybe. I've almost forgotten when school keeps down here."
The discussion was interrupted by a tap on Bob's shoulder, felt
by both speakers. Both looked ahead, the Hunter having no choice
in the matter. The island which Bob regarded as home, though he
had been away from it well over half the time for the last ten years,
was clearly visible ahead, the low sun accenting the ridges which
formed the two arms of the L-shape, and gleaming from the
square outlines of the culture tanks which studded the lagoon.
Dulac banked a trifle to the right, and eased back on the throttles.
"Well be down in fifteen minutes," he assured his passenger.
"Good." Bob's approval was very sincere, "I'm sorry I talked you
into a. ride this bumpy, but at least we'll be home that much
sooner."
"You mean you will. It doesn't matter that much to me where I
sleep. What you've talked me into is having tomorrow off, thanks. I
was supposed to get this bucket to Ell by tomorrow night for work
the next day. As far as the ride was concerned, you did all the
suffering, so don't apologize to me."
Bob had done a little flying during his college years, though
nothing as large and heavy as the Dumbo had been involved. The
procedures of let down, pattern entry, and final approach were
meaningful enough to keep his attention off his stomach for the
remaining minutes of the flight. They swept above the western arm
of the island, almost above Bob's home, at five hundred feet,
though only the pilot could see the house—they were in a left bank
onto the downwind leg, and when they leveled on an eastward
heading, the land was behind and to their left. Final approach
carried the amphibian over the shorter leg of the L, only a few feet
above its ridge and the tanks it carried. Bob thought he recognized
a few faces on the long causeway which led out to the dock where
the tankers loaded, but didn't have time to be sure. He had the
impression that there were more houses in the village—the area at
the bend of the L, where the road from the causeway met the one
which ran the length of the island, but again he couldn't be sure;

there were too many trees. It was likely enough that there were.
Pacific Fuels, Incorporated, had been doing very well, especially
during the recent Korean troubles, and the population of the island
had been climbing, It had been about one hundred and seventy
when the Hunter had first come ashore on Ell nearly eight years
before, after his crash in the ocean outside the reef; now, both he
and his host knew, it was about fifty greater. Many of the new ones
were children, of course, but by no means all. The store, the
school, and the library had all been enlarged, and more adults
were needed to take care of the increased production facilities.
The landing area was marked off by buoys, and the numerous
boats and canoes on the lagoon were safely clear. Dulac touched
down within twenty yards of the runway's beginning, let the
amphibian come to a near halt, and manipulated his throttles to
bring the machine about. This brought the right cockpit seat,
occupied by Bob and the Hunter, toward the shore, and both
examined the island eagerly for changes; they had not been there
for two years. Even from here, however, the trees kept them from
seeing much. The long northwest leg of the island was still heavily
jungled. Boats could be examined more easily: Most of the ones
occupied by juveniles were now being paddled, towed, or sailed
toward the long dock, though their owners were careful to keep out
of the, airplane's way. The island population was of a mixed
descent that was largely Polynesian, and the adults were casual
about allowing children of all ages on and in the water, but took a
very dim view of their offspring's violating the more common-sense
safety rules of swimming and boat-handling. Few of the
youngsters would have risked being kept ashore for a week or so,
since they got no sympathy from their friends.
They even left tie-up room at the float, a twenty-yard-square
structure two hundred yards from shore connected by a slanting
gangway to the main dock. The raft itself was crowded with
youngsters by the time the amphibian nosed into the notch
provided for it, but they kept well back from the propellers as Dulac
cut his mixtures and let the blades whirl to a stop. Bob and the
Hunter knew most of the faces in the crowd, but were attracted to
a lanky, six-foot-plus blond youth who approached with a line in his
hands and began the job of mooring the aircraft It was Kenneth
Malmstrom, one of the quintet who had shared unknowingly in the
Hunter's police problem seven years before.
The sight of the young worker sent their minds in two different
directions as Bob and his symbiont made their way back toward
the hatch of the Catalina. Kinnaird himself was wondering whether
any of the others would be on the island. He knew that two of

them, Hay and Colby, were at colleges in Melbourne and Arizona
respectively; but Rice was working for PFI and might be around,
and Bob had been seriously considering his help in the new
problem.
The Hunter was not thinking that far ahead. He was wondering
whether Malmstrom, obviously available, could be trusted with the
information he would need to be really helpful. The alien was
inclined to doubt it. Of the five, Malmstrom had always seemed to
him the least mature and reliable. It might or might not be relevant
that he had not taken up the standing company offer of a college
education for any of the island children, in return for a six-year
contract after graduation. Many young people refused for reasons
quite unconnected with intelligence. Still, Malmstrom seemed
content with a low-responsibility job which demanded little of his
imagination and brains, and the Hunter hoped that Bob would not
get too enthusiastic on the strength of meeting the first of his old
friends after a two-year absence.
The enthusiasm was certainly there. The moment the taller
youth saw Bob at the hatch, he dropped the line he was holding
and sprang toward him.
"Bob! You old bookworm! Are you back for good?" He shook
hands violently, and he and Bob went through the back slapping
routine which still bothered the Hunter after more than seven
years. He knew the injury involved was negligible, but several
human lifetimes of habit are hard to break.
"I guess so," answered Kinnaird. "I haven't signed anything,
yet, but might as well get my degree worked off as soon as
possible. You knew I was coming, didn't you?"
"Sure, but not just when. We really didn't expect Dulac and his
Dumbo until tomorrow. When you were sighted, they phoned me
to get down here and earn my dividend. Maybe I ought to get a job
in the States, where work hours are a lot more definite. Out here
they expect things to be done whenever they have to be done, no
matter what time it is—even dinner time."
"How do you like what you're doing?" asked Bob.
"What more's to ask for? I sweat a few hours each day, get
paid for it, and do what I want the rest of the time."
The Hunter was not surprised by his answer, and hoped that
his host would take it as evidence of Malmstrom's unsuitability for
their project. Of course, there was no risk of premature disclosure
with the present crowd around them—unless Bob collapsed— but
it was always possible that words might escape which would be
hard to cover up later, unless Bob shared the Hunter's doubts
about "Shorty".

In the hope of forestalling any such slip, the alien put a question
of his own into Bob's ear.
"How about Rice? Is he here on Ell?" Kinnaird could have
answered his symbiont without attracting attention, but there
seemed no need this time. He simply repeated the question aloud.
"No, he's on Tahiti."
"Working for PFI, of course."
"Oh, sure. He gets over here every so often. I don't know just
what he does, but it doesn't let him get outside much. I haven't
seen anyone with lighter skin until you showed up. Doesn't the sun
shine in the States any more?"
"Some places. New England uses other things in its tourist
literature."
"Such as?"
"Oh, its brain factories." Malmstrom had finished mooring the
aircraft, and was helping Dulac get its cargo onto the float Bob had
been removing his own luggage at the same time, doing his best
to keep his physical condition from being too obvious. He did not
succeed very well; both he and the Hunter were disturbed at
Malmstrom's next remark.
“They don't make muscles there, do they? You're pretty far out
of shape, Bob old buddy."
Kinnaird gave a shrug, covering as well as he could.
"It's been quite a trip. I'll take you on in a few days, after I get
tested up."
The conversation was interrupted, to the relief of the Hunter
and his host, by a shrill voice from the main causeway above.
"Bob! What did you bring me?"
The sun was just on the horizon, in Bob's eyes as he looked
toward the dock, but he didn't need to see to identify the speaker.
Daphne, his six-year-old sister, was plunging down the gangway at
a rate which made the Hunter uneasy, even though he had no
direct responsibility for the small creature's well-being.
He remarked to his host, "If she had been around when I first
met you, I'd have been led badly astray in our little problem."
Bob chuckled; knowing what his symbiont meant The Hunter
had been seeking a fugitive of his own species who had escaped
into space. Pursued and pursuer had crashed near Ell; both had
made their ways ashore and found human hosts. The Hunter had
been faced with the task of locating the other without help from his
fellow police, without a background situation in which everybody
harbored a symbiont of his own and took for granted that everyone
else did, and without any of the technical equipment which would
normally have helped him to locate his quarry and separate it from

its host without harm to the latter. He had succeeded because the
criminal had made no effort to train his host in elementary personal
care. The symbionts were able to stop bleeding from injuries, to
dispose of infecting microorganisms) and within limits even to
minimize pain. Human beings like the humanoid species of the
Hunter's home planet, tend to limit their behavior by what they find
themselves getting away with; if sixty miles an hour doesn't hurt
them, they are soon doing sixty-five.
Arthur Kinnaird, Bob's father, by all accounts a normally
cautious adult of his species, had become increasingly casual
about situations offering personal danger. He had been getting
away with everyday actions which should have given him cuts,
sprains, bruises, splinters, even minor burns; he had expanded his
behavior accordingly...
That had been seven and a half Earth years ago. Now Arthur's
daughter was acting as though nothing on the planet could hurt
her. The Hunter might have wondered whether his old quarry had
survived after all, but Daphne had been the same at the age of
four; the Hunter did not criticize to Bob, but he felt that either her
parents or her culture or both were taking better care of her than
was strictly healthy. Whether he liked it or not, it was not his
problem. He had made enough mistakes of his own, with his own
host, and would have to solve the problems those had created,
first. If he could. -
Daphne swarmed up her brother, squirrel fashion, chattering.
She was genuinely glad to see him; the question of what he had
brought for her was not repeated. Bob, to the Hunter's relief, was
able to support the forty pounds or so of her rather skinny form,
but both symbiont and host were relieved when she dropped back
to the float and took up a wild dance around him.
"Should I drop you overboard to cool you off, Silly?" her brother
asked.
"Go ahead. Mother wouldn't let me swim out, but if you do I'll
just swim in."
Bob made no attempt to continue the argument He captured
the child, more or less immobilized her, and greeted his mother,
who had descended the gangway more sedately.
"Hi, Mom. You're here pretty quickly. Were you waiting for me?"
"Just hoping. We heard the plane and biked down on the
chance. I hope someone took pictures of your graduation; I wish
we could have gone."
"I have 'em. You're letting this monkey use a bike already? I'm
surprised she didn't ride it down the plank."
Daphne assumed an indignant expression, barely visible in the

swiftly gathering darkness. "Of course not," she said. "I'm not
allowed to ride the bike on the dock." "Good for you, Mom. I never
thought rules would take with this one."
She's no worse than you were,” his mother pointed out.
"Locking up the bike a couple of times made her see reason. As I
recall, with you and that deathtrap of a boat your friends had at
first—”
"All right. We were all young once." Let me play old-fashioned
mother just this once. If you see my husband, tell him I'd rather he
came right home without bothering about the luggage tonight."
"Sure, Mrs. Kinnaird. I'll help with this stuff any ' time they don't
have me doing something else. I sup pose some of it goes to
the library, anyway."
"Those two big ones," Bob pointed out
"Did you really have to read all that? Glad I made the choice I
did. I'll see you around, Bob; any idea what they'll have you
doing?"
"Well, I have a degree with high honors in chemical engineering
from one of the most prestigious institutions east of the Hudson
River, so they'll probably want to show me that there are eight
experienced chemical, engineers on Ell already and that my
muscles will be more useful to PFI than my brains for the next few
years. We may be sweating side by side, for a while anyhow."
"I can believe it." Malmstrom waved farewell as -the family
group started up the gangway, and turned back to his work.
Bob had uttered not a serious prophecy but rather his and the
Hunter's major worry. It was quite likely that he would be assigned
to the less pleasant and more physical aspects of his long-term
job, and in his present condition he wouldn't last out the first day.
Stage One of the complex plan they had been working out
involved getting the help of the island doctor to forestall such an
assignment. Seever was one of the few people who knew about
the Hunter, and the alien and his host were counting heavily on
both his sympathy and his professional knowledge in what was to
come. The airplane float lay a quarter of a mile from shore along
the causeway, and by the time the three walkers reached the inner
end of the latter, darkness had fallen, though a gibbous moon
made walking easy. With a sigh of relief, Daphne set down the
suit-case she was carrying.
"I can't take this on my bike," she pointed out. "You take it on
yours, Mom, and I'll walk mine home with Bob."
"You didn't bring mine?" asked her brother. "How could we? We
were riding our own."
"I'm glad there are still things I can teach you. Not right now,

though; I'm kind of tired, and don't feel like walking all the way
home." His mother looked anxious for a moment, but neither Bob
nor the Hunter caught the expression.
"You've been going a good many hours," she said. "I don't
blame you. Daph, leave the bag here and go look for your father—
yes, on your bike, as long as you stay with the streetlights. He's
somewhere down at this end. Have him get a jeep and meet us
here." The child obeyed without a word, her mother smiling after
her.
"She's not usually allowed to ride alone after dark. You've
probably noticed the new lights—they're just here in the village,
and go along the road only as far as the school, our way. How's
the Hunter, son?
Bob had no chance to answer. They were under one of the
lights, at the point where the dock road met the one which ran the
length of the island, and people had seen them. All of them knew
Bob, and the island population—the older ones, this time—rapidly
gathered to welcome him back and ask about his college life. The
Hunter was completely uninterested in the conversation, quite
worried about his host's chances of remaining on his feet long
enough to reach his home, and annoyed at his own feeling of
helplessness.
Eventually a jeep whipped down the road from the northwest
and pulled to a stop beside the group. Bob's father and sister
emerged, the latter ducking behind her mother without making any
effort to recover the bicycle in the vehicle's back seat. Arthur
Kinnaird, rather brusquely but without actual rudeness, broke up
the gathering.
"Evening, Ben—Hi, Maria—Hello, everyone—Bob, hop in. We'll go
out and get your stuff. Small fry, get your bike and go home with
your mother. We'll be there as soon as you are. Sorry to take him
away, folks, but he's been traveling long enough to need sleep.
We won't even talk to him ourselves until tomorrow."
"I don't think he's right about that," the Hunter remarked to Bob
as they started out the causeway. "You're not going to be able to
carry luggage, and that's going to have to be explained to your
father, at least."
But at first it seemed that no immediate explanation would be
necessary, and the Hunter began to hope. Arthur Kinnaird insisted
on his son's staying in the jeep while he made two trips down to
the float. If Bob had been paying close attention to what he
brought up, the explanation might have been put off until the next
day: he did not need the footlocker that remained on the float, and
if they had driven straight home after hi3 father's first two trips,

Bob would have had just enough strength to get inside the house.
But his father made a third trip down to the float. He found,
besides the footlocker, only the book crates which were obviously
too large to attempt. He put his hand into one of the straps at the
end, and gave an exclamation of pain. "Bob! Bring the flash-light
down here, will you?"
The trip down the plank had to be made carefully, but Bob was still
on his feet when they reached the bottom.
"What's the matter, Dad?" he asked. The elder Kinnaird
removed his hand from his mouth long enough to answer.
"Cut myself on something under that locker handle. Take a
look, will you?" He bent over to look himself as his son directed the
flashlight beam to the indicated Spot. The source of the cut was
obvious enough. "I didn't think we had anyone like that on the
island,"
Arthur Kinnaird remarked. "Could it have happened anywhere
else along the way?" The lid of the this metal box had been pried
roughly outward, and the stretched part of it's edge had torn to
form a jagged V-shaped notch, its two corners projecting Just
above the loop of leather which formed the handle.
"I'm not a professional baggage thief, but that seems a silly way
to go about it," replied his son. "You'd think anyone wanting to get
at the contents would work on the latch or the hinges."
"What's in it?"
"Don't remember exactly, but nothing extra valuable. Mostly
clothes, maybe some of the books for the library, though they're
mostly in the big cases. I'd have to check to be sure. I
accumulated a lot of junk while I was away, and I couldn't bear to
throw much of it out, with PFI paying the freight home. Are you
hurt much?”
"I'll live. Too bad you hadn't been working on carrying the
footlocker. I suppose your friendly, lump of green jelly is still with
you—sorry I didn't say hello to you, Hunter, but you aren't that
obvious."
"Yes, he's here still. If your cut's bad enough, we can—"
"It's not that serious. We can leave this thing here, for now,
since you don't think it has anything important. Let's try to get
home before the ladies."
Bob hesitated; he was very near the limit.
"I'm not sure I can get myself up the gangway again," he
admitted at last, knowing that now he could not put off explaining
his weakness.
"Humph. Your sister said you looked bushed. Was the trip that
bad?"

"Even Silly noticed it? We were hoping she wouldn't. No, it
wasn't the trip. It's more complicated, and I'm sure we're going to
have to get Doc Seever in on it."
"You've been hurt? Something the Hunter couldn't fix, or hasn't
had time to fix?"
"Not hurt. There hasn't been any accident. It's been coming on
for a long time. I'll tell you and Mom about it after Silly's in bed; it'd
be too much trying to make her understand—or have you told her
about the Hunter?"
"Decidedly not. Come on; let's get you back to the car. Do you
mean you have some kind of disease that the Hunter can't
handle?"
"On the contrary, you might say. Sorry to put it so bluntly, little
friend, but—Dad, the Hunter has caused the trouble. What he or
we or anyone can do is a wide-open question."
No more words were spoken the rest of the way up the plank.
2. Details
In spite of what had happened at the dock, the jeep reached
the Kinnaird home very shortly behind the bicycles. The few
minutes rest as they drove restored Bob enough to let him get into
the house without assistance, though the luggage stayed in the car
for the moment.
The suitcase Daphne had carried was of course inside; her
mother had yielded to the pressure, and carried it home on her
own bicycle. The child promptly dragged it over to the couch on
which her brother had thankfully collapsed.
She wanted it opened at once, of course, and the resulting
activities filled the time until food was served. Every minute of rest
that Bob could get was good, of course and it was fortunate that
Daphne was content to let him stay on the couch and hand out
presents— very much plural, to the little girl's delight—which made
up most of the contents of the suitcase.
The Hunter was getting quite impatient by the time she was
sent to bed. Mrs. Kinnaird was perfectly aware that something was
wrong by this time, though her husband had spoken only a word or
two to her after his arrival; she, too, wanted to hear the details.
Eventually, protesting but not really resentful, Daphne was
dismissed upstairs to what had formerly been her brother's room.
Fortunately, since he could certainly not have handled stairs too
many times a day, Bob was to sleep in a wing which his father had
built at the back of the house during the past year—largely a
matter of luck, since he certainly had not foreseen his son's
troubles.
Eventually the child was quiet, and the rest of the family was

able to get down to business. Bob had long ago planned what he
should say. The Hunter knew that he wouldn't enjoy listening,
since the words could not possibly make him look very good, but
was mature enough to face the situation. It was the mother who
opened the conversation, after a final trip upstairs to make sure
the child was asleep.
"You're not just tired, are you, Bob? There's something more
serious."
"I'm afraid so, Mom," was the answer. "I don't know just how
serious—it might drag on for a long time, but it wouldn't be very
smart to count on that.
This actually started before I was home two years ago. It wasn't
very bad then, and it didn't seem a good idea to worry either you
or Doc Seever with it, but it's been getting worse ever since, and
something really has to be done now."
"Does the Hunter have a reliable prognosis? I mean, has he
encountered this sort of thing before?" Bob's father cut in.
"Not personally, he says. He's heard about it historically;
when his species meets a new type of host it wouldn't have
happened now if he were a doctor instead of a detective. Let me
give it to you. From the beginning." Both his parents nodded their
approval.
"You both know what the Hunter and his people are like—
about four pounds of something vaguely like human protoplasm,
but made of molecule-sized units instead of the relatively huge,
cells of our tissue. His people can live independently, at least on
their own planet, but normally exist inside the body of a larger
creature in a state of symbiosis. The Hunter has been doing that
with me for years, sharing the food I eat, seeing through my eyes,
hearing with my ears, and paying for his keep by destroying
invading germs, stopping blood loss from cuts, and so on. Also,
he's a personal friend, though not as close as we might be on his
home world; we don't have the facilities here which would let him
live a normal life, and we don't have very similar interests. He's a
detective, and his partner at home was also a police official; he
went through my chemical and other courses in college with me,
but didn't enjoy them as much as I did. On his world, partners don't
join up until they've known each other for a long time. Here, he
didn't have much choice.
"His people have had contact, since they've developed space
travel, with other more or less humanlike races, and have been
able to carry on the same sort of life-sharing with these. It's not so
routine, though. No two planets, as far as their experience goes,
seem to produce fife with identical chemistry, and a lot has to be

learned before the symbiosis really goes smoothly.
"Naturally, the Hunter's partnership with me is in the less well
organized category. He was never completely sure that he
wouldn't do me some harm. We're enough like the other
humanoids he's known so that he could recognize and offset my
normal immunity reactions in about the same way he was used to,
and of course with him there I didn't need them—he could take
care of infections, just the same, he would check every few days to
make sure his neutralization of my immune response to him hadn't
had more general effects, for example, if I got a splinter in my
finger he'd wait to make sure my body reacted normally before he
cleaned up the intruding bacteria.
A couple of years ago, I failed one of those tests. I got badly
infected from a minor scratch, and the Hunter found that my
immunity chemistry just wasn't working at all any more. He took its
place, of course; there was no danger as long as he was with me.
Of course, if anything were to happen to him—" Bob didn't finish,
but his parents nodded.
They remembered the circumstances which had caused them
to learn about the Hunter—Seever, the island doctor, had been the
only one Bob had let into the secret before the police project had
been concluded. Bob had bluffed the alien fugitive into leaving his
father's body, and destroyed the creature by fire; but the departure
had been very hasty. A short time later, Arthur Kinnaird had fallen
ill. The symptoms were a blend of pneumonia and meningitis, and
Seever had been mystified. Eventually, he and Bob had
persuaded the reluctant Hunter to transfer to Arthur Kinnaird's
body to investigate.
The problem had been straightforward enough; virus like cells
left behind by the fugitive in its hasty departure had lost the control
and coordination of an intelligent creature and were simply living
without regard for the welfare of their host—the sort of thing, on a
much cruder level, which the organism originating them had done
and which had made it a criminal by the standards of its species.
The Hunter had had no trouble incorporating the units into his own
structure. Seever had felt it necessary to give the whole story to
Bob's mother, who was quite intelligent enough to recognize and
be bothered by any half-truths; and later on, when her husband
had regained his senses, he had also been told. Under the
circumstances they had little choice about believing, and had
eventually come to take the Hunter for granted—even addressing
him directly at times, though of course their son had to transmit
any answers.
"In a way," Bob went on, “I'm a sort of addict of my symbiont.

It's not just the immunity thing, now. Other parts of my personal
chemistry keep going hay-wire every few months. Sometimes the
Hunter can spot the actual cause and do something about it,
sometimes he has to use his own abilities in a way not really
related to my own body's handling of the same problem—for
example, the way he handles infection by consuming the
organisms responsible instead of chemical neutralization.
"He's described the whole thing as a juggling act. As time goes
on, he has to devote more and more, effort and attention to
keeping my machinery going. Quite often some step he takes
interferes with, one or more of the things that he's already doing;
or that my own biochemistry is normally doing. Unless we can find
some fairly simple key cause for all this and do something effective
about it—well, he admits, that sooner or later the juggler is bound
to drop a plate."
"I suppose he can't just withdraw entirely and let nature take
care of the situation," Mrs. Kinnaird asked.
"Nature isn't that interested in me," her son replied. "The
juggling act is just what every living body goes into, and drops out
of, sooner or later. Letting things go on their own and shutting eyes
and ears may produce 'natural' results, but there's no way to be
sure your own survival is included in the meaning of 'natural.'
Knowledge is what is needed if you hope for things to go your
way."
"But surely the Hunter has the knowledge! You told us he could
identify thousands, maybe millions, of chemicals—even
unbelievably complex things like proteins—by his own senses. He
can produce lots of them deliberately. You once said that if you got
diabetes he could take over the making of insulin for you."
"I did, I do, and he does. He can do a lot. He is doing a lot, but
he has his limits, and they're a long way short of complete
takeover of the chemical machinery of a human body. What you
miss is the fact that, unbelievable as his abilities are, the
complexity of the problem is even more unbelievable. You're more
realistic than the weirdoes who think you can heal a burn by
shining the proper color of light on it, but you're still not really in
touch with the problem."
"Then this weakness of yours is a continuing thing?" Bob's
father asked.
"Not exactly—that is, I'm not weak and tired all time. One of the
plates that's slipping has something to do with my muscles. The
Hunter can't spot anything specifically wrong with them, or with
their individual cells, or with the way the cells are interacting and
using food, or with the nerves connected with them; but after I've

started to get tired—only a little tired, or what should make me only
a little tired, they just lose power. The Hunter not only can't sense
the cause, he can't even provide a makeshift remedy like
delivering sugar or other necessities to the cells directly—it doesn't
work. It isn't a matter of getting more fuel to the cells, or running
stronger messages along the nerves, or a lot of other things—he
could tell us thousands of things it isn't."
There was silence for many minutes.
The older people could not, of course, believe that there was no
solution to the problem. This was their child. No longer really a
child, and not even their only one, but theirs. They had taken for
granted that he would still be alive when their own jugglers
dropped the last plate. They would have been embarrassed to say
aloud that there had to be an answer, but neither could think along
any other line. Neither thought consciously of blaming the Hunter
for what had happened, though the wife thought fleetingly that it
would have been nice if the alien had chosen to take up existence
with the doctor after completion of his police project—Seever
might have been able to take effective steps while the problem
was still simple. She never brought this point up aloud, however. It
was she who finally broke the silence. "What do you and the
Hunter plan to do, now that you're here?" she asked. ''You must
have a plan— you'd be looking even worse than you do, without
one."
"Do you really think Ben Seever can do anything?" was Arthur
Kinnaird's contribution. "He can't possibly know as much as the
Hunter, even if he is a doctor rather than a detective."
Bob nodded basic agreement with the point; it was one he and
the Hunter had considered long before.
"I don't know what he can do, Dad, but we can't help being
better off with him than without him. We're telling him the whole
story tomorrow. I'd have to see him anyway, since I'll be expected
to have a checkup before reporting to work; tomorrow's Friday,
and I'm sure PFI will expect my muscles to be available Monday. If
nothing else, Doc may be able, to think of something which will
keep me out of heavy-muscle work. If I don't do anything useful at
all, they'll want to send me to the States or Japan for a real
medical going-over, and we've got to stay here." "Why?" both
parents asked at once. Bob smiled. "Don't give up when you first
hear it. The basic assumption may be wrong, but at least it's not
ridiculous. Our first job is to find one or both of the ships that
crashed near Ell nearly eight years ago. What do you know about
self-contained diving gear, Dad?"
Arthur Kinnaird, quite predictably, ignored the question and put

one of his own.
"What good will the ships do? Are there supposed to be
medical supplies in them? Would anything useful have lasted this
long under water?"
"Probably not," admitted Bob. "We're not looking for supplies or
equipment. The Hunter's ship was certainly thoroughly wrecked,
and it's likely the other one was too. We need something else.
"We—-the Hunter and I—-have been thinking this through for
over two years now, and we've reached one very firm conclusion.
This problem can be solved, if at all, only by specialists among the
Hunter's own races. This sort of thing has happened to them
before when they encountered new species, and at least some of
the time they have found answers."
Arthur Kinnaird was frowning thoughtfully; his son's expression
was more hopeful.
The man spoke. "How on Earth, if the phrase means anything,
will finding either of those ships get you in touch with specialists
from the Hunter's world? Do you think there are radios in them that
will reach that far? And did you ever figure out where he came
from, anyway? I thought he said he was hopelessly lost among the
stars?"
"Let's see, Dad; in order, if I can. No, neither of us expects to
find anything usable in either ship. Radios wouldn't mean anything
even if they worked; it would take fifty years or so for
electromagnetic waves to make the trip one way. Our idea is a
little less direct and maybe a little less promising, but we think it's
more than just wishing.
"It's true that when I first knew him, and for quite a while
afterward, the Hunter believed he was hopelessly lost. It wasn't
until I took an astronomy course, with him looking on of course,
that he got a reasonable idea of how thinly the stars are scattered
in space, and how few are the possibilities that would have to be
considered by the people who might be looking for him. He knows
the time he traveled, though not the distance in any of our units.
His departure direction was known to his own people, though of
course they won't know how far he went. He feels sure that when
he failed to return in a few of our months, searchers would have
followed his line. He is even more sure that he did not pass at all
close to any stars likely to distract those searchers; ours was the
first that he and his quarry came at all close to. His friends should
have had no trouble in finding this planetary system."
"But there are nine planets going around our sun," Mrs.
Kinnaird pointed out, "and even if they narrowed it down to this
one there are a lot of square miles to cover."

"That's why—or one reason why—we need to find the ships.
They'll help us estimate the searchers' chance of narrowing down.
The Hunter says that even when they're shut down, the faster-
than-light engines involve force fields which can be spotted from
millions of miles away—that's how he was able to follow the other
ship. He's not sure how long the fields would last, or how far away
they can be sensed, after the sort of violence which his own ship
suffered. Sooner or later corrosion would destroy them so
completely that no field effects would remain, and that's another
reason we want to find them—to see how far that process may
have gone."
"But no matter what their condition, what can you and the
Hunter, or the rest of us, do about it?" asked his father.
"It will affect our plans. If the ships were detectable, searchers
will have already covered this island very thoroughly—probably
when the Hunter and I weren't here. If they weren't, at least the
searchers would have found Earth, and the Hunter is certain they'd
have been interested, in the planet and in humanity. They'd have
gone home, reported, and by now a team would be somewhere on
the planet giving it a going-over for five to ten years to decide
whether they should make open contact with humanity. If I could
be sure of living ten years, we could sit back and wait."
"Assuming they decided in favor," his mother pointed out."
"Yes—I suppose I shouldn't be taking that for granted; In any
case we can't wait. The real question we have to solve is whether
there'd be members of the Hunter's species here on Ell, as there
would be if they'd found the ships, or whether all of Earth has to be
searched. I must admit I'm hoping for the first,"
"But would they still be here if they had found them?"
"Not steadily, but they'd come back from time to time to check
on the pilots. They'd have found no trace of them, and they'd want
to rescue the Hunter and arrest the other one."
"Why should they care about the arrest, alter such a long
time?" the woman asked. "Was he that terrible a criminal?"
"I don't know—just a minute." Bob waited while the Hunter
covered the point, then relayed. "He had done things for his own
convenience which endangered his host, without the latter's
consent. He was therefore self-centered enough to be a danger to
any human beings he used; they'd want to get him as a protection
to our own people." "Would he have done what the Hunter has
done to you?" asked his father. It was the first time he had let
bitterness enter the conversation.
"That's not fair, Dad. The Hunter didn't do this on purpose, and
he's trying to repair the trouble. The other one would simply have

found himself another host when I became too messed up to be
useful—probably long before now, since it's taking a lot of effort to
keep me going already."
"All right, sorry. Why wouldn't these searchers have left
messages around for the Hunter?
"Because they couldn't be sure the other one had been
disposed of, of course. For the next obvious question with a less
obvious answer, where would the Hunter leave messages for the
searchers—except in the ships? It would have to be someplace
they'd examine closely, and they won't check every drain pipe on
this island, much less on Earth. Anything which could be seen
from any distance would attract human attention, which would be
very bad until the team decides about open contact."
"And if they haven't found the ships?"
"Then neither of us has any good ideas. The best is to publish
some of the Hunter's police codes, transcribed as closely into local
alphabets as possible, in large-circulation papers; but that's not
very promising with, say, fifty investigators scattered over the
planet. We'll try that if we have to—it'll take even more help than
the other operation—but we certainly hope we don't have to."
"So do I." Arthur Kinnaird's voice had dropped from its earlier
rather sharp intensity. "All right. You've made your case for doing
some diving. We'd better find out whether those mine detectors
they used in the war will work under water—"
"In principle, yes," Bob interrupted. "We'd have to make sure
water didn't get into their circuitry, though. Do you think we can get
hold of one? It should make a big difference, especially if the ships
are under coral or mud by now."
"We'll try. There's nothing else we can do. I wish I could be
more optimistic. Hunter, when you come right down to it, you really
can't be sure whether any of your people have reached or will
reach Earth, can you?"
The alien relayed a "No" through his young host, very
reluctantly. He had problems enough without destroying Bob's
morale, he felt. However, the word seemed to make no difference
to the young chemist. Certainly his father noticed nothing, and was
not thinking along such lines, for he went on,
"Is it really possible you can feel sure they can find this solar
system? I can see their picking out Earth if they do, but photos I've
seen of the Milky Way star clouds look pretty discouraging when it
comes to a hide and seek game. Bob, look at the ceiling and start
reading the Hunter's answer to that. I don't want to discourage
anyone—I don't want to be discouraged myself, but I've got to
have a realistic idea."

"He doesn't talk to me by shadowing the retinas any more, Dad;
he speaks directly into my ear bones. But I'll relay."
The Hunter couldn't afford to hesitate, under the circumstances.
He spoke, and his host quoted.
"The only doubt is raised by the nature of your Sun, which is
much brighter and hotter than ours. It is possible that there are
stars more like our own which lay fairly close to our line of flight; I
can only say that my instruments failed to detect them. If they got
a really good fix our departure direction, which they should have
very easily, they would have to examine this system. It is possible
they'll have to check others, too, but I've been here for nearly eight
of your years. I honestly consider the chances very good indeed
that some of my species are on Earth right now."
"There was no chance of his dodging?" "He was an even less
experienced astronaut than I. If he ever wanted to get back home,
he would not have dodged."
"Would he have wanted to get back? What was he running from?
Enough to make him panic?"
"Nothing capital. He would have been sentenced to ten or fifteen
of your years in symbiosis with an un-intelligent work animal—a
hard labor sentence." "And how long is that to your people,
subjectively? How long do you normally live?" The Hunter had
never expected that question, and was totally unprepared to dodge
it. He had never intended to discuss the matter with any human
being, least of all with his own host. However, the questioner was
waiting for an answer, and any sort of hesitation would do more
harm than good.
"Our own life spans are rather indefinite, though we do die
eventually. The beings we originally learned to live with, on my
home world, usually last about forty of your years with our help.
We average perhaps a dozen times that, but cannot count on it.
The sentence, if anything, would have seemed milder to him than
to you. In any case, we are now guessing about what other people
would be guessing. I must admit that there is no absolute certainty
that my people have come or will come to this planet, but I
consider the chances good enough to justify planning on that
basis, especially when such a relatively short distance seems to
be involved."
"Short distance? Then you think you've identified your home
star?" Mrs. Kinnaird's voice was eager.
"We think so." Bob was speaking on his own, now. "It's a very
funny group of stars, and only one system like it was ever
mentioned in my astronomy course. We think it must be Castor.
That's a six-star system -—two bright ones very much like Sirius,

each with a faint companion which we don't know much about
because we can't see it—they just cause a periodic Doppler shift
in the bright stars' spectra—and finally a pair of red dwarf suns,
circling the others a long way out. We know a lot about those
because they form an eclipsing spectroscopic pair; we think they
must be the suns for the Hunter's planet, because everything we
could check about brightness and periods and so on seemed to fit.
They're what are called flare stars, which fits, too. The whole thing
is forty-five or fifty light-years away. The Hunter isn't really sure
about the speeds of their interstellar flyers, but thinks the distance
is reasonable."
"You've mixed a few pronouns up—mostly the 'we's'—" his mother
said, "but I think we get the picture. All right, we'll be optimistic
too—we have to be, just as both of you do." The Hunter
appreciated her choice of words; after the confession about his life
span, it would not have been unreasonable for a human being to
suspect that Bob was just another incident in his life, who would be
dying a little sooner than his other hosts. In fact, the alien was
seriously disturbed, by Bob's situation, and at least as much
bothered by his own responsibility for it. He was not permitting
himself to think about his own future if they failed to save Bob's
life.
Bob's father might have been as aware of this as his wife seemed
to be, but his words provided no evidence either way. His job with
PFI involved enough responsibility to make him a forceful and
decisive person, and his words, after a few moments' thought,
concerned only the actions to be taken.
"All right. Step one, Bob gets a good night's sleep so he can at
least start tomorrow looking and acting normal. Two, he visits Ben
Seever first thing in the morning, tells him everything, and takes
whatever steps possible to get an assignment which won't make
his condition any worse. It would be nice if it left him free for work
on the search project, but we'll stay with possibles for the moment.
"Three, I do what I can about getting hold of free-diving
equipment—I know there isn't any on Ell, but I think the company
is experimenting with it on Tahiti. I also do research on metal-
detecting equipment, its availability and usefulness for underwater
work.
"The Hunter thinks of every possible way to get the attention of
any of his people who may be on the island, or on Earth, without
going to the extreme of publishing the whole story worldwide. I
wouldn't mind doing that myself, but if it would interfere with
whatever they'd normally be doing here, it might cause them to
give up Earth as a bad job and leave. I don't see that that is really

likely, but we're not taking the chance.
"Finally, both Bob and the Hunter give serious thought to which,
and how many, additional people we might let into the business. I
doubt that five people, one in shaky health and one restricted in
his physical movements, are going to be enough. I know it will take
thinking, but think."
But it was not thought which started the first recruiting action.

3. Complications

"Lighted any more fires lately?"
It was not a standard greeting by any criteria, and to both Bob and
the Hunter it was more than disconcerting. The young woman who
had given it was not herself surprising; they both had known Jenny
Seever for years, and had heard that she was working for her
father. As the island population had grown, the company had
made additions to the Seever residence, turning it into a small
hospital. Seever himself had had to become a little more formal in
the matter of keeping records on his patients. The first thought to
cross the minds of the two visitors was that Seever had made a
record of the earlier project, and his daughter had come across it
in the course of her work.
Bob, however, rejected this after a moment's thought. The doctor
would not have written anything down, much less left the record
where anyone else could find it, without first consulting Bob
himself and his symbiont.
Nevertheless, the girl seemed to know something. The police
project had indeed ended in a fire, an oil-fed bonfire which had
consumed the alien fugitive, and the question could hardly be
coincidence. However, Bob had read his share of detective stories,
and was not going to be tricked into telling her more than she
might already have learned.
"Lots," he answered, after a hesitation which he realized was
probably revealing. "It was a good spring in the Northeast, and
picnics were quite the thing before finals. Why?"
Jenny made no direct answer; her listeners got the impression that
she had not expected the sort of response Bob had given. In this
they were quite right. Since she was much quicker-witted than Bob
or the Hunter, she knew better than to continue firing blindly after
the first shot, had missed. She changed the subject, letting others
make what they could of it— not that she thought of the man
standing in front of her desk as representing two people, of course.
“I suppose you want to see Dad."
"Sure. I can't start work for PFI without a checkup, and I owe

PFI several years of work in return for my chem degree, so
obviously PFI wants me to have a checkup. Also, I'd like to see
him anyway, just as an old friend. Is anyone with him now?"
"Yes. You'll have to wait." She couldn't resist one more shot
"Would you like some matches?"
"No, thanks. I don't smoke."
"Not even fuel oil?"
"Not for fun."
The Hunter rather wished he could take part in the duel, but
had to admit to himself that his host was doing well enough.
Obviously the girl knew something; any chance of coincidence had
vanished with the second question. It would be necessary to learn
her status from the doctor before anything revealing could be said,
but this seemed as obvious to Bob as it was to his symbiont.
"People have queer ideas of fun," Jenny countered.
"I see. Like being mysterious. Look, Kid, or Miss Seever or
whatever you want me to call you, I don't know what you're talking
about." The Hunter, with the passion for strict truthfulness which
had developed naturally in his long life, was rather disturbed by
this remark. Even the reflection that it was not totally false, since
Bob could really only guess what she was talking about, did not
console him completely. "If someone has burned a house or
something like that here on Ell, I don't know anything about it—I've
been away for two years, and just got back last night. If you're
talking about something else, you'll have to be specific enough to
make sense. If you're just being funny, it isn't. If you've been
reading mystery stories, change detectives. I'm not falling for the
all-is-lost-fly-at-once line."
"Why should you?" she asked. Bob felt for a moment that he
had made a slip, but carried on without a break that anyone but
the Hunter could have spotted, both hoped.
"I shouldn't and I couldn't. There's nothing to fall for. If you're
suggesting that I'm a pyromaniac, check your dad's files—you
keep 'em now, don't you?"
"Thanks. That's an idea I hadn't thought of," she returned. I'll do
that when I have the time."
Neither spoke again for ten minutes or more. Both sat, thinking
of all the things he might have said differently. The Hunter made a
few suggestions to him, but got no response. Jenny paid no
obvious attention to her visible guest, and appeared to be busy
with her normal paper work.
Eventually a door opened and a ten-year-old boy with his arm
in a sling came through, followed by the doctor. The latter
interrupted an admonishment about tree-climbing as he caught

sight of Bob, came over to shake hands warmly, and ushered him
into the examination room.
"Heard you were back—I suppose everyone has, by now. For
good this time, isn't it? Did you drop over to be sociable, or are
they putting you right to work? How are you, Hunter?—I suppose
you're still there."
The Hunter almost answered; Seever was the one human
being who sometimes made him forget that communication had to
be by relay—who habitually spoke to him as though direct
conversation were possible. Bob was usually amused by this, but
showed no sign of it this time.
"Both, I guess," he answered Seever's last question -first. "Yes,
the Hunter is here. Nothing's been said officially to me about
showing up for work, but I imagine they're taking it for granted.
Unless I'm told otherwise, I'll be over at the main shop on Monday;
but there are problems I'll need your help with, first."
"Oh?"
Bob wasted no time in recounting the situation; Seever listened
silently. He nodded or raised an eyebrow at times but said nothing
until Bob had finished. Then he summarized.
"As I see it, you two want to find one or both of those
spaceships, or their remains, as a step toward getting in touch with
some of the Hunter's people who may or may not be on Earth, in
the hope that they can solve or get hold of someone else who can
solve, Bob's medical difficulties, assuming they can be solved.
Pretty iffy. We are hoping they can be, that they're actually on
Earth, and that finding the ships will help you find the people. I
won't ask pardon for the loose pronouns, you know what I mean.
My job is to keep you functioning, and, if possible, free part of the
time—holding the juggler's plates in the air, as the Hunter so aptly
puts it—until all this is ac-accomplished."
"It could be said more encouragingly, but that's right as far as you
go," conceded Bob. "You do have one other job. Somehow PFI will
have to be persuaded to use me in some way that won't either kill
me too soon or reveal my medical problems to too many people.
You can't just say I'm not able to work. Old Toke takes a big
interest in people, and I can imagine his shipping me back to the
States, or Japan, or wherever he happens to think I can get better
medical attention than you can provide here. I mention this, of
course, just to keep you from loafing between the shots of
whatever you have to give me to keep me going."
"Phmph," snorted Seever. "Whatever I—
"And in addition," the young man went on, "you'll really have to
do something about Jenny."

"My daughter? Why? If you're falling in love with her I certainly
don't object, but you'll have to do your own courting."
"Did you ever tell her about the Hunter and our adventures a
few years ago? Or tell your wife so Jenny could have heard, or
write any of it where she could have come across it to read?"
"No. None of those. I've wanted to tell Ev, but it isn't my secret.
I will, if you and the Hunter ever let me. I've never written any of it
anywhere."
"Then why did Jenny just now greet me, or us, with questions
about fighting fuel oil fires? As I remember, she was away from Ell
when we disposed of the Hunter's little problem—-and she'd have
been only about eleven then, anyway."
"That's right, she was." Seever was both puzzled and surprised.
"I can’t imagine what she's up to, or what she's found out, or how.
If I talk in my sleep that coherently I'm sure Ev would have said
some-thing, and it still wouldn't explain Jenny's hearing me. Do
you want to have her in and ask her right now, or have me ask her
alone later on, or hold everything until you've done some thinking
and investigating on your own?"
The Hunter expressed himself strongly in Bob's ear, but his
host had reached the same conclusion in- dependently and even
more quickly.
"The last, by all means. I'd just as soon she didn't know we'd
even mentioned it to you. We have no idea how much she knows,
or why she's interested. If anyone starts asking her, she'll feel
more certain she's on to something real—if she isn't certain
already, of course. The only fire I can imagine her asking about is
the one I lighted when we tricked the Hunter's quarry out of Dad's
body—I can't remember ever lighting another that would mean
anything special to anyone, at least. I can’t see why she should be
asking, if she never heard about it from anywhere."
"So," Seever cut in, "you're between Dilemma's right horn of
needing to find out what she could have heard and where she
could have heard it, and the left one of not wanting her to think that
what she has heard means anything—if she doesn't already. I can
see that, and will do my best not to make things any more
confusing. I won't say anything to Jen if she doesn't start saying
things to me. If she does, I'll find out what I can. You're right—she
wasn't here that other time; she was in the hospital on Tahiti
recovering from bone surgery I couldn't handle here, and her
mother was with her. As you say, she was only eleven anyway.
Someone else must have seen you light the fire, and must have
told her, assuming there's any rational basis at all for her question.
The alternative is not only impossible for me to consider, but calls

for more coincidence than I can stomach." He paused in thought
for several seconds.
"Look," he said at length. "I’m not going to say anything to her
unless she spoke first, and I'll keep the promise unless you
release me, but give this some thought. If I don't say anything to
her, thereby implying that you didn't say anything to me about her
fire questions, won't that itself be suspicious? Why wouldn't you
have mentioned it to me? Shouldn't I question her, not as though
she poking into someone else's business, but as though I were
wondering about her state of mind?"
The point seemed well taken, to the Hunter. Bob was less
convinced.
I can't stop you," he said slowly, "and don't want to hold you to
a promise which goes against your judgment. So—well, do what
you think is best. You certainly know her better than I do. The
Hunter and I have to find those ships, and can't spend time yet
finding out what Jenny's up to.”
Seever raised an eyebrow; it seemed to him that his daughter's
actions might be relevant enough to the current problem to
deserve very close and immediate investigation. Bob failed to
notice the change of expression, and the Hunter failed to see it
clearly. His host's eyes were aimed in more or less the right
direction, but the image of the doctor's face was not in their foveal
region. The alien could make use of the less central parts of the
retinas better than their owner could but not perfectly; there was
no remedy for the fact that the eye lenses did not focus perfectly.
"Somehow," Bob went on, "we've got to get hold of a boat.
Dad's looking for diving gear and metal-finding equipment, but the
ships certainly went down off the reef—at least, the Hunter's did,
and that generator casing from the other turned up at a place
which suggested it had been brought from outside. We'll need a
reasonably good boat, because there'll be wind and surf problems
out there."
Seever accepted the change of subject. "It'll need size, too, to
carry air pumps and hoses and all that stuff," he said.
"Maybe not. Dad's going to try to find free-diving gear—the sort
of stuff that fellow Cousteau has been developing. I was pricing it
back in the States, but couldn't afford it or I'd have brought a set
with me."
"Maybe the company has some."
"Dad was going to check that. Even if it does, though, I'll have
trouble using their stuff full time."
"You'll have trouble doing anything full time except work for
PFI. I may be able to clear you from heavy muscle work or fix you

up so you can do it, but I don't see you spending eight hours a day
poking around on the ocean bottom outside the reef. Thorvaldsen
is very pro basic research, but your project would hardly fit
anything he's likely to have in mind."
The Hunter and his host had talked this situation over at great
length, and Bob was able to respond promptly.
"We've had some ideas on that. Remember, I have an even
better certainty that it can be done about both fusion power and
faster-than-light travel than Toke had about biological engineering
back in the twenties, when he started PFL. I'm as certain about
them as the Russians were about the nuclear bomb—they didn't
have to steal anything; when we used it, we'd given them free the
only bit of knowledge whose lack might have kept them from
making their own. If I could convince Old Toke that I really had
something in either line, he'd probably back me carte blanche for
basic research. There are only two troubles. One is that I'll have to
solve my medical difficulties first, before I'll really have much to
show him; and second, I can't honestly tell him either that I know
how the Hunter's people do these things, or that they start giving
up technical information hand over fist after they've cured me. In
fact, as the Hunter admits, they'd probably be very cagey about
letting me or any other human being learn many details for a
generation or so, even after they open Earth up to symbiosis, if
they do. I don't like the idea of deceiving the old guy for several
reasons, not the least of which is my doubt that I'd get away with it.
"Of course, this just may be my uneasiness about telling
anyone about the Hunter and his people any-way; every time I
think of it, I think of the word spreading that R. N. Kinnaird has lost
his marbles."
"You know I could prove your story," Seever pointed out. "I did
to your parents."
"You'd be taking a chance. Not everyone has been cured of
synthetic pneumonia by a lump of green jelly, and not everyone
who learned about the jelly would react in a nice, friendly, rational
manner. I don't want to sound too paranoid, but I can see people
who learned about the Hunter resenting my advantages."
"Your present 'advantages' are hardly targets of jealousy."
"We're assuming my problems are going to be solved—
remember? I'm trying to take the long view. Let's make the
spreading of the word to the upper echelons the very last string to
the bow, and concentrate on finding a decent boat."
"With no diving gear at all, even the self-contained sort you
mentioned what hurry is there for a boat? Surface diving off the
reef won't let you search below three or four fathoms, and even

that would take roughly forever," Seever pointed out.
"Of course. And I couldn't do much in one day without wearing
myself out, unless you can do something about these weakness
attacks. That wasn't the idea. Do you remember that piece of
metal the fellows and I found out on one of the reef islands, the
one that almost got Kenny Rice drowned?"
"I remember your telling me about it. You said it was a
generator casing or something like that from one of the ships. I
never saw it myself."
"That's it, we want to find it again, and let the Hunter check it
over more carefully. He thinks he can get some idea of how far the
other one traveled with it. He'll try to move it around himself under
water to get some idea of the effort involved, maybe even
backtrack. That thing certainly wouldn't have dragged very freely
through the coral."
"Won't the coral have grown enough in the last seven or eight
years to make that sort of detailed study pretty futile?"
"Maybe, but the Hunter thinks it's worth doing, and I agree. At
least it will help us narrow down possibilities ties until we get the
diving gear. Of course, any other ideas which anyone gets will be
welcome, too." I
Seever sighed. "All right," he agreed, "let's get down to my
strictly medical part of the problem. Let me take a blood sample,
not that I have the lab equipment I'd like, and I'll see if I can get
any ideas from what I don't find in you." His expression was clearly
pessimistic. "There's one sort of known illness which vaguely
resembles what you describe, and I've heard of a drug which might
possibly help the symptoms. Just to make you happy, there's no
claim it will touch the cause, which no one has yet identified. Of
course, I don't have the drug here."
"Where would you have to send for it?" asked Bob. The
States?"
"Japan would probably be faster."
"Is it something you ever use? I mean, will anyone here get
suspicious if you order it?"
"Don't get paranoid, youngster. No one ever checks on what I
order. I'm my whole department. There's no one on Ell who would
react to the name 'neostigmine' even if he saw the order, except
maybe Old Toke himself. If you really want to worry, devote your
thoughts to the fact that I'm only 'guessing it may help. Maybe I'll
get more ideas from your blood, but don't count on it. Even though
the Hunter is a detective, not a biochemist, and has grown up with
a nonhuman species, he must know more about human
physiology and biochemistry than I do. If he tells you to do

anything, do it; don't wait for my advice."
The Hunter knew that Seever was right, but rather, regretted his
having brought up the point. Bob's morale was already quite low
enough, and keeping him alive was already hard enough. Trying,
to keep the young chemist's hopes up was complicated by his
intelligence; anything encouraging, to be worth, saying, had to be
reasonable. He and the Hunter had talked, long before and very
briefly, of the possibility of finding the fugitive's ship and learning
enough from it to let them build a larger one capable of taking Bob
himself to Castor. Bob had dismissed the notion out of hand; it had
been perfectly obvious to him that the job would have been
analogous to a Cro-Magnon man's trying to copy an airplane
engine. It was not a matter of native intelligence, but of the
culture's back-ground knowledge.
"I'll take blood from inside the right elbow, Hunter, if you want to
get out of the way," Seever said as he approached with a large
syringe. "I won't bother with the ligature if you'll supply a little back
pressure on the vein."
The Hunter agreed, Bob nodded, and seconds later the doctor
had his sample.
"What now?" he asked. "Have you started to feel that fatigue
yet today?"
"Nope, not yet. All I've done is bike down here, of course."
"What are you going to do now? Start looking for a boat, or
entertain your sister?"
"She's in school for a few more hours, thank goodness. It's a
pity vacation starts so soon. I'm just as bothered how to keep her
little nose out of this project as I am about keeping it secret from
the rest of the island—I suppose those amount to the same thing;
if she knows, she'll tell her friends. However, we'll play that by ear.
The first problem is a boat."
"What happened to the one your bunch used to have?"
"It sort of died of old age. The last time it started to fall apart,
none of us had the time to fix it."
"Well, I have a suggestion, but you may not like it."
"What?"
"Jenny has a boat—more of a canoe, really—that she might
be willing to lend."
"Without being told the whole story? I can't believe it."
"Oh, I wouldn't say she was that feminine," the father chuckled.
"I wasn't thinking about her sex, I'm assuming she's human. I
wouldn't lend one of my own without a pretty good idea of what the
borrower wanted it for. I was expecting to buy one so as to be able
to use it without anyone's being entitled to ask what I was doing

with it. Going outside the reef and working close in can be risky,
especially with the wind from the west, and the owner would have
every right to wonder if my head was on straight. Certainly Jenny
would, if she's wondering about me already. You sure she hasn't
been asking you about me?"
Seever's expression changed as he thought for a moment.
"Well, now that I think of it, she has; but there was nothing
about fire in her questions. I mentioned a few weeks ago, at dinner
I think, that my old-young friend Bob Kinnaird was going to be
back from college before long, and she did put a question or two. I
don't remember just how she worded them, now, but they seemed
perfectly ordinary to me at the time. She never did know you very
well, she'd been away at the time of the other problem, and I
assumed she was wondering why I regarded you as a friend rather
than just another patient."
Bob thought for several seconds, without consulting the
Hunter.
"Maybe had better talk to her about the boat. It will be an
excuse for talking, and maybe this fire business will start to make
some sense. All right if I call her in?"
Seever nodded agreement, but things didn't work out quite as
expected. The moment Bob opened the door to the reception
room, he and the Hunter saw several people waiting. Jenny
promptly nodded to one of these, who as promptly rose and
headed for the examining room, leaving Bob with nothing to do but
hold the door for her.
The situation also left him with little to say, except the basic
request which was intended to start a longer inquiry. For a moment
Bob wondered whether he should even do that; he asked the
Hunter inaudibly; "Should we wait?" The alien advised him to ask
about the boat anyway, since one was so badly needed. Bob
almost nodded, but remembered in time.
"Jen," he asked, "your dad says you have a boat, and I need
one for a while. Can I come back after office hours and see you
about borrowing it?"
Jenny hesitated, too. Both Bob and the symbiont felt that the
question, for some reason, surprised her.
"There aren't any real hours. Dad's open all the time, but I'm
generally through by four or so. Come back then if you want. But
tell me—have you been talking to that stringy towhead
Malmstrom?
" "I met him when I landed yesterday just before sundown, and
we talked old times for a few minutes until my folks showed up."
"He didn't say anything about my boat?"

"No. Why should he? Is it only for the use of blond males over
six feet three inches, or something? I could bleach my hair a little,
but I don't see how I can get five inches taller." Bob had taken a
chance the Hunter felt, asking questions which might lead to
project-related answers with other people present, but Bob himself
felt otherwise. He was sure that Jenny, whatever she said, would
keep some sort of control in public; and the need for doing so
might, he felt, distract her from the job of concealing things from
him. It didn't work, however.
"No," was all she said. "Forget it. I'll talk to you later." The four
people in the waiting room had obviously been listening, and at
least two of them were openly amused. Jenny glared at one of
these, a girl about her own age, went back to her desk, and very
pointedly busied herself with her paper work. Bob tried to catch her
eye, but she didn't look up, and after a few seconds he left.
Outside, he steered the bicycle toward the dock, rather than back
home.
"You know," be muttered to his guest with less than impressive
originality, "there's something queer going on. I wish I could guess
whether it has anything to do with us or not. Her question about
fire suggests it does, but that's all. I could believe she was having
some sort of feud with Shorty—"
"Which needn't be connected with the fire matter at all," cut in
the alien.
"True." Bob's train of thought was momentarily derailed, and he
brooded silently as they rolled down the road. Finally he said more
firmly, "Maybe we'd better hunt up Shorty and get another piece or
two to this jigsaw." The Hunter agreed that this was sensible, but it
did them no good; Malmstrom was not to be found.
It was Friday and he should have been working, but that did not
help in locating him. Both working times and working places
tended to be variable on Ell, since the population was small and
the work had to be done when it had to be done. Malmstrom was
still part of the youngest and least skilled section of the work
force—what Bob thought of as a "hey-you" —and he might literally
be anywhere on the island. However, some places were more
likely than others. He was not at the seaplane float, where the
Catalina was moored unattended. Bob remembered that Dulac
had said he was to have this day off. Malmstrom was not
anywhere around the refinery and pumping station at the end of
the dock. There was no tanker in that day, so the pumps were idle,
but the refining section was always busy; it took the best part of an
hour to make sure the one they sought wasn't there. This was
partly because of the changes which had taken place since Bob's

boyhood; the refinery had expanded and grown much more
complex during the Korean troubles. To the original marine fuels
and lubricants which had once been the principal products of the
organization, there had been added the more volatile liquids
needed to slake the enormous thirst of jet engines; and more
recently still, raw materials for plastics had been placed on the list.
The same expansion was noticeable along the northeast leg of
the island, where they went next. There were more culture tanks;
the distillation plant had been duplicated; and new and faster-
growing vegetation covered the areas devoted to tank fodder.
There were plenty of people at work, but Malmstrom was not
among them.
He could, of course, have been at any of the tanks which dotted
the lagoon. He could have been somewhere on the longer
northwest leg of the island, though none of the industry was
located here—it was all residential where it wasn't jungle. He
might, Bob admitted to his companion, be hiding out from work
anywhere around the lagoon, though that seemed unlikely.
Everyone on the island was a PFI shareholder from birth, and the
general attitude toward parasites was very negative.
The search ended just before noon, when Bob's muscles gave
out. Neither he nor the Hunter was particularly surprised. There
was nothing to be done about it but rest. They were near the
northeast tip of the main island at this point, on a slope with the
coral reef running out straight ahead of them, the lagoon to their
left, and the empty Pacific to the right. There were no houses in
this part of Ell, though parts of three culture tanks could be seen
behind the ridge. They were on the road, which was narrow here
and closely bordered by fodder-plants—the quick-growing stuff
which was constantly being harvested and dumped into the culture
tanks to feed the hydrocarbon-producing bacteria. There was no
one in sight, which was a relief to both of them.
Lying down was distasteful but unavoidable; Bob had to rest.
The' soil consisted largely of tank sludge, and was one reason
there were no residences at this end of the island. The smell was
as offensive to the Hunter as to his host; the former avoided it by
withdrawing from Bob's lungs—where he usually left a small part
of his tissue directly exposed to the incoming oxygen—and making
do with that available in the blood stream. The alien's need for the
element was small except when he was operating independently
of a host.
"It's an awful place to rest, and I know it bothers you too, but
there's not much else we can do," Bob said as he settled down
beside the bicycle. "I'll have to get back into at least walking

condition if we're to keep that date with Jenny this afternoon."
"Perhaps we could make the doctor's house from here by going
on foot very slowly," the symbiont suggested. "At least, shouldn't
we try? He would certainly want to examine you in this condition,
I'm sure, and even if you haven't recovered by four o'clock you
could still talk to the young woman."
"Two miles? Forget it. Besides, if I walked in like this—or more
probably crawled in—she'd have to have some explanation."
"I've been thinking about that," the symbiont replied. "If you use
her boat, you'll probably have to explain a lot anyway, as you
yourself were saying to her father. Also, you can't go alone to do
the searching; neither your parents nor the doctor will be available
for help much of the time; it's her boat, she'll probably want to go
along with us at least part of the time, and we're going to have
trouble finding a convincing reason why she shouldn't. Bob, I know
you like it much less than I do—after all, I'm merely following a
reasonable regulation which can legally be violated if
circumstances demand it, while you are quite reasonably afraid of
being thought crazy or a liar by people who don't get the story first-
hand and with all the evidence; but I am getting resigned to the
idea that we're going to need several more of your people in this
operation with us—fully informed."
"You can really get away with breaking your regulations?"
"I would have to justify my actions, but we tend to have much
respect for the judgment of the man in the field. I have already
exercised that discretion with you, the doctor, and your parents,
and am not worried about any penalties when we are rescued. I
am quite certain that none of you will let out the word in such
broadcast fashion as to interfere with the work of any exploring
team. I do believe, now, that a few more members of this in-group
are going to be needed to save your life—which I regard as much
more important than holding certain principles inviolate."
"And you think Jenny is a good prospect?" asked
Bob.
"I don't know. She should be useful; she is clearly intelligent or
she could not be doing the work she does for her father. She
appears physically strong— she is nearly as tall as you, and I
judge not much lighter. If she uses this boat of hers very much, I
feel safe in assuming that a reasonable fraction of the weight is
muscle. Another point from the work she does—her father
evidently trusts her discretion, or she wouldn't be doing .his
medical records. Your species has what I consider an exaggerated
idea of the importance of privacy in such matters. Think it over—
but I think I'm right."

Bob did not think for very long; he fell asleep. This was one of
the most inconvenient human habits, from the Hunter's viewpoint.
He himself could not sleep in anything like the human fashion; he
remained conscious as long as the oxygen supply was adequate.
His humanoid hosts on his home world spent less than a tenth of
their time in sleep, and the cultural situation was based on this fact
and provided activities for the small symbionts during these
periods.
When, and if, Bob's medical problem was solved, the Hunter
knew that he would have to work out some rather difficult details
about their partnership. Presumably the examination team, if it
decided to join up with humanity, would have solutions to offer.
At the moment, he could do something. The surrounding
vegetation was strange to him—the breeds were always being
replaced with new ones by the biological engineers—and there
existed a small chance, that something useful in the medical
problem might be present. The Hunter extended a fairly large
pseudo-pod through the skin of his host's hand and gathered in
some of the material, pulling it close against the skin, digesting it,
and checking the breakdown products for new materials. A few
seemed promising, and samples of their molecules were absorbed
through Bob's pores and between the cells: of the inner skin layers
for local, very careful testing of their biological effects. The Hunter
himself did not leave his own tissue outside for long; sunlight drove
him back inside. The Castor C twin suns produced strong
ultraviolet only during the aperiodic flare times, and he could stand
very little of it.
He devoted the rest of the sleep to investigation. He had to
experiment; dangerous as it might be, ignorance was even more
so. He increased and decreased hormone secretion, trying to
decide when one or another was not only doing a primary job but
also affecting the flow of still others.
It was detective work, but he wished he had studied biochemistry
more carefully a couple of human lifetimes ago.

4. Arrangements and People

Robert Kinnaird woke up with the weakness gone for the moment,
but with a brand new trouble to consider. He had not eaten since
breakfast, their search not having taken them anywhere near his
home, and he had a completely empty stomach, for which the
Hunter could vouch. For some reason, however, he was feeling an
extreme nausea. The suggestion, even the thought, of eating
made him double up, almost out of control. He didn't dare ride in

that condition, having no confidence in his ability not to think of
food, so |they set off toward the village on foot, wheeling the
machine.
After a mile or so the sensation wore off, but since they did not
know the cause and couldn't be sure it would not come back, they
decided against riding.
The road was wider, with buildings now quite frequent on
either side; the Hunter saw and remembered the one which had
figured in the flaming climax of their adventure seven years before.
As they approached this structure, a child of about ten or
eleven appeared from behind it, watched them, silently until they
were in front of him, and then fell in beside them.
The Hunter was curious, but could not take a good look while
Bob was keeping his eyes on the ground.
The group walked another hundred yards or so before the
youngster spoke. Then he asked abruptly, "What's wrong with the
bike?"
"Nothing," answered Bob, looking directly at him for the first
time.
"Why aren't you riding it?"
"Why do you care?" The child looked startled at first, then
rather resigned.
"No special reason." He didn't quite shrug his shoulders, but
somehow gave the impression that he felt like it.
"Just curious. If you don't want to tell me, don't."
Bob pulled himself out of his negative mood and said, "Sorry.
I've been having stomach cramps, so I couldn't ride and felt
terrible, but I shouldn't take it out on you."
"That's all right. Going to the doctor's?"
"Yes, it seems a good idea. Wouldn't you?"
The conversation dropped. The Hunter had had his good look
at the youngster, but hadn't gained much by it. The only even
slightly unusual characteristic of the child was his weight. The Ell
children tended to run lean, since a high level of physical activity
was the accepted thing. This one was not really plump, but by
island standards was decidedly heavy for his height. His features
and complexion were standard for the island, a mixture of
Polynesian and European; his skin was brown, hair black, eyes
blue, nose and chin rather sharp. He wore the usual shorts which
were equally stylish in or out of the water.
There was simply nothing remarkable about him, and neither
Bob nor the Hunter gave him another thought, for a few minutes.
Their attention was completely diverted from him when another
bicycle pulled up beside them to reveal that their morning's search

was over. Kenneth Malmstrom was with them.
"Hi, Bob. Just heading home for lunch? Mine was late, too."
"I'd sort of forgotten about eating," Bob responded. "Been riding
all over the place to make myself at home again. I'd like to do the
same on the water, maybe tomorrow. Too bad the others aren't
with us— and the old boat."
"I'd go, but I'm not free this weekend—at least, I'm not exactly
working, but I have to stay in hearing of a phone tomorrow. I
suppose you'll want to go anyway, before you start work too. Any
idea when that'll be?"
"Well, Doc checked me over this morning. Unless he finds
something out of line, I suppose Monday. I wouldn't know where or
what. If you're not free tomorrow or Sunday, I might as well row a
bit by myself, if I can find a boat."
"Lots of those around," Malmstrom assured him. "I'd let you
have mine, but I sold it to a kid over a year ago—didn't have
enough time for it to make it worth the upkeep work. Speaking of
boats and fun—you, Andre. Have you been around the airplane
again?"
"When?" The boy who had been standing silently, beside them
seemed neither surprised nor indignant at the question.
"Any time since it got here yesterday, but especially this
morning. You remember what you got told after you tied the wheel
struts to the float under water, where no one could see the rope?"
"I remember." Bob, with the memory of his father's injury the
night before rising in his mind, looked at the child with interest; but
neither he nor the Hunter could read anything from Andre's
expression. There was certainly no fear, and no really obvious
amusement. Malmstrom was not trying to analyze; he already had
his suspicions and intended to air them.
"Well, someone's done it again. I hope no one's seen you
around with a length of rope, or you're in trouble."
"They haven't. I'm not." The young face remained
expressionless. Malmstrom eyed the boy sternly for half a minute,
but got nothing for his trouble and finally returned to the earlier
subject.
"I sometimes miss the old boat, but there are plenty around—
you can always borrow one."
"So I gather," replied Bob. "The Doc said his girl had one she
might be willing to lend; I'll go back after I eat and—what's so
funny?" Malmstrom was grinning broadly.
"Doc's a swell guy," he chuckled, "but he's too fond of Jenny.
She can't do anything wrong—ask him. Wait till you see the boat.
She made it herself."

"So? Don't most people? What's wrong with it?"
"She used some kind of kit she sent away for. It's mostly
canvas. I wouldn't get into it for money."
"Did you tell her that? Did she ask you to ride in it?"
"No, she sure didn't. I've been kidding her ever since she
started making it."
"I see. Well, I'll be seeing Doc again anyway, but thanks for the
warning. I'll use my judgment about Jenny's boat. See you later;
I'm hungry."
"And I'm late. So long." The tall youth pedaled rap-idly away in
the direction from which the others had come, and all three looked
after him thoughtfully.
"He's pretty dumb," the child suddenly volunteered!
"Why?" asked Bob. "He found out about your tying up the
airplane, the other time."
"No, he didn't. He couldn't find his own nose if it was after dark.
Someone told him I did that, and now he blames everything on
me."
"And he's never right?"
"Sometimes. A busted clock is right twice a day." There was
still no expression behind the words or on the face.
"Is he right about Jenny Seever's boat?"
"You said you'd see for yourself." There might have been
reproach in the child's tones, this time. Bob was somewhat
amused, and the Hunter was developing a real interest in Andre.
He, too, had thought about the incident of the footlocker.
Bob had resumed wheeling the bicycle toward the doctor's.
Andre accompanied them as far as the road which led down to the
dock. He turned down this way while the others went on,
eventually reaching the Kinnaird home.
Bob's mother had expected them much earlier and had obviously
been worried; her son made excuses and apologies without
mentioning the fatigue attack. As he ate, he gave a somewhat
edited report of his talk with Seever, mentioned that he and the
Hunter had bicycled around much of the island, and eventually
spoke of the possibility of using Jenny's canoe.
"Do you know anything about that, Mom?" he asked. "We met
Shorty Malmstrom just before we got here, and when I said
something about Jenny's boat he nearly split. He said he'd never
want to ride in it. She didn't strike me as exactly incompetent; is
she?"
"I don't believe so," his mother answered. "I know the Seevers
very well, of course; Ben and Ev are probably our best friends.
Jenny took care of Daphne quite often when she was very small. I

never heard anything about her boat, or about any fuss between
her and Shorty. Of course, there could be some story current
among the teen-age set that I might never have heard; you should
check with someone younger. Even Daphne might know more
than I."
No opportunity of consulting his sister arose, how-ever; she
seemed to have gone with friends after school, and her mother did
not expect her until suppertime.
Bob rested until nearly four, and then headed back to the
Seevers'. He used the bicycle, but not without some hesitation and
discussion with the Hunter. It might delay the onset of the next
fatigue attack; on the other hand, it would be a nuisance if the
nausea struck again. The Hunter could not even guess which was
more likely to happen, since he had not yet come up with a
specific cause for either, so he voted for speed.
There were still patients in the waiting room when they arrived,
and Jenny was still at her desk. When she saw Bob, however, she
slipped the papers in front of her into a folder, rose, and came
toward him.
"Let's go," she said, "I'll show you the boat, if you still want it."
"What about the other people here?" asked Bob in some
surprise.
"They don't need me. It's Dad they're after. Did you think he'd
gotten so formal that everyone has to be escorted from waiting
room to office?"
"It looked like it this morning."
"Not the story. He expects me to be useful and tactful—"
"And decorative?" Her eyes, little more than two inches below
his, swept over his face for a moment, but she showed no other
sign of being impressed by the remark.
"That wasn't mentioned, thanks. As long as the records are
straight and he can find anything he wants, I'm earning my
dividend."
They were outside now, and Bob gestured toward the bicycle
rack. "Walk or wheel?"
"Walk. Most of the way is on sand." She led the way, not
toward the road leading down to the dock, but almost directly
toward the water, threading among houses and gardens along the
narrow paths which separated them. The girl seemed to feel no
need of conversation, and the Hunter was perfectly willing to think
rather than listen. Bob, however, felt that time was not a
commodity he could afford to waste.
"We saw Shorty just before lunch. What does he have against
you, anyway?"

The girl stopped and faced him, somehow looking even taller.
"Do you want the boat?" she asked curtly.
"I won't know until I've seen it, and probably not until I've tried
it," Bob retorted. His tone showed annoyance; the Hunter knew he
was acting, but Jenny fortunately did not. "D'you think I let Shorty
do my thinking for me? I asked what he had against you, not your
canoe."
"I suppose you wouldn't." Jenny appeared to relax, and
resumed the way toward the shore. "I don't know why he's like that
I got the plans for the boat by mail, and the first time he saw me
working on it he offered to help—actually he said he 'could do it for
me.' I said I'd rather see whether I could do it for myself, and I
haven't heard a polite word from him in a year and a half. He
keeps asking me if it's had moths, or a run in the bottom, or a lot of
other things he seems to think are funny. I wont blame you for your
friends, but don't expect me to have much use for that one."
"Maybe he felt insulted by your refusing his help."
"Maybe so. I certainly felt insulted by the way he offered it—as
though 1didn't have a chance of doing it right by myself, I don't
know whether he felt that way because I'm a female, or just
because my name isn't Kenneth Malmstrom and I'm less than six
and a quarter feet high."
"Knowing Shorty, I'd guess the latter," Bob soothed. "He was
sometimes that way with the rest of us, but we didn't take him very
seriously. If he got too bumptious it was usually easy enough to
come up with a put-down hard enough to hold him for three or four
weeks. I thought he'd pretty well outgrown that, though, the last
time I was home."
"Maybe he has, with you. Putting him down, doesn't work for
me. He knows I did a good job with the kayak, he's seen it; he's
seen lots of people use it, but whenever he sees it or me he
makes remarks. I bet he did when you saw him today."
"Very vague ones. As I said, "I'll make up my mind when I see
the boat. If you, and other people have been using it for a year and
a half I won’t worry about the thing itself, but I still have to judge
whether it's big enough for what I need." "What's that? Or don't
you think I'd understand?" "Why shouldn't you? I have to look
for some special things. One of them is, or used to be, out on one
of the reef islands, Apu. Anything that'll carry me there will do. The
other is under water, almost certainly outside the reef, and I'll need
a boat that I can dive from when my equipment gets here."
"You mean pumps and that sort of thing? My kayak can't carry
anything like that."
"No, I mean free diving with personal mask and air tank. You

may have read about it."
"I have. You're getting that?"
"When I can afford it, unless Dad can come through earlier. I'm
short on paydays so far."
"That should be fun. I've thought of doing it ever since I heard
about it. Can I go with you?" Bob had expected the question, of
course, but had failed to plan a very farsighted answer.
"You mean alternate dives with me, or something like that? I
can afford only one outfit."
Jenny stopped and looked at him again, this time with her lips
pursed into a schoolmarmish expression.
“I realize that Shorty Malmstrom must have been named from
his brains, not his height, but I bet even he wouldn't think of going
free diving alone. Do you have more lives than money, or what?
Maybe I shouldn't trust you with my boat, after all."
Even the Hunter was startled. Bob was dumb- founded.
Incredibly, neither of them had thought of this particular safety
question, in spite of the Hunter's awareness of the human
tendency to crowd the experience limit, and also in spite of his fear
of what that tendency might do to his host—and his knowledge of
what it had done, luckily for the Hunter himself, to his host's father.
The simple insanity of Bob's working under water with only the
Hunter with him had never crossed either of their minds; the fact
was that there was nothing the Hunter could do about drowning.
He could make a fairly effective gill system out of his own tissue,
but there was only four pounds of that and a human being needs a
lot of oxygen. It was possible that the Hunter could keep his host
alive for a time under water, but probably not conscious and
certainly not active, especially in warm water. The solubility of
gases, including oxygen, goes down with rising temperature.
"You're right!" Bob gasped. "We'd forgotten all about that—at
least," he tried to recover what he thought was a slip, and
hesitated a moment before he saw the way—"at least I forgot;
maybe Dad thought of it and didn't say anything. We will have to
get two sets—and it'll have to be only two, at first. We can't put off
the search until I can afford more."
"Then it's important," Jenny said.
"Yeah. Life and death, to be trite." The Hunter was almost
certain that his host was by now convinced of the need for more
help, though nothing more had been said on the subject since the
discussion at midday, The alien had convinced himself that Jenny
would be a good recruit. He had not intended to exert any more
pressure on his human companion; but couldn't resist at this point.
"You're going to have to tell her," he vibrated into Bob's ears.

"She'll think I'm crazy as Shorty. We'll hold off just a little." The
vocal cords just barely oscillated, but the alien was ready for the
message. He couldn't shrug Bob's shoulders, but was tempted to
try.
Aloud, Bob said to Jenny, "I think I can tell you more a little
later. It's not entirely my own secret." This was technically true, but
once again misleading enough to bother the Hunter slightly. "I'll tell
you a little—my own part of it. There's a problem which will kill me
if it isn't solved fairly soon. Your father knows about it, since it's
partly medical, but I don't want to tell you details until I've talked to
him and one other person. I hope you don't mind."
"I do, a little, but I won't fight it. Do your own folks know?"
"My parents do. Not Silly."
"All right I'm curious enough to light matches between your
toes, but I guess I can wait. I warn you I'll pry anything I can out of
Dad. Of course he doesn't talk about patients' affairs, but there are
ways."
"Do your best." Bob was actually pleased with the answer. He
would be delighted if she could actually get the story from some
source other than himself; that way, whether she believed it or not,
there would at least be no doubts about his own sanity. The
Hunter hadn't thought of that side of the question, but was pleased
at the general trend of affairs.
Bob wondered briefly whether he should try to get word to the
doctor before his daughter reached him, but decided there was
nothing to be gained. Medical ethics would of course tend to keep
Seever quiet; if his daughter was smart enough to get through that
barrier, she would presumably be smart enough to be helpful to
him and the Hunter.
The boat looked all right. It was different enough from most of
those on the island to show the Hunter and his host why
Malmstrom, not in the habit of deep or thoughtful analysis of the
things he saw, might consider it funny. Small and double-ended, it
consisted essentially of a canvas-covered wooden frame.
Consequently, it was very light.
“It's called a kayak, in case you've never seen anything like it.”
Jenny spoke rather nervously as they looked it over, she was
clearly afraid that Bob would react as Malmstrom had. "I made it
from a kit I got by mail from the States. It's good and steady, and
I've had it outside the reef plenty of times with no trouble."
"It looks fine to me," Bob assured her. "One thing —it's light,
and must ride pretty high when it's empty or has only one
passenger. Could a diver climb back aboard without capsizing it?"
"Sure. I swim from it a lot, and have no trouble getting back in.

It's a trick, but I'll show you."
"Okay. Then if you'll let me use it, I'll look over Apu tomorrow. I'd
do it right now if we had more than an hour or so to sunset."
"May I come with you? Or don't you want me to see what you're
looking for?"
"Even money she'll know by then, anyway," the Hunter
muttered to his host. The latter hesitated, looking thoughtfully at
the young woman. She looked back at him steadily; the nervous,
defensive attitude had disappeared.
"Is that a condition for using the boat?" Bob asked at length.
She shook her head negatively, confirming the Hunter's opinion of
her intelligence. As Bob fell silent again for several seconds, she
removed the broad-brimmed hat which shielded her rather pale
skin from the sun, and let her mahogany-red hair blow free. To do
her justice, she was not consciously using the good looks of which
she was fully aware in an effort to influence the young man's
decision. This was just as well, since neither Bob nor the Hunter
was giving the slightest thought to that aspect of the matter. Her
five feet eight inches of height and one-hundred-and-twenty-plus
pounds of weight had probably never produced less effect on a
male observer.
"All right," Bob said at last. "The sun will be up by a quarter to
seven. Can you be here by then?"
"Sure. Do you want to try out the boat, now?"
"Why not? That double paddle looks as though it might take
practice."
"Can I come, too?" came another voice. Bob turned abruptly,
and saw the small boy who had accosted him earlier in the day.
Jenny showed no surprise, having seen him approach. She
answered the question without consulting Bob by voice or glance.
"All right, Andre. Ride forward when we get it in the water."
"Can I paddle?"
"Some of the time. Bob needs practice, first."
Dropping her hat on the sand, Jenny lifted the kayak onto her
head, refusing with a gesture Bob's offer of help. The child made
no such offer, not even bothering to pick up the hat.
Bob kicked off his sneakers and rolled up his trouser legs,
retrieved the hat, and handed it to Jenny as she set the kayak
down in calf-deep water. She had not bothered to keep slacks or
sandals dry; she simply seated herself in the middle of the small
craft, nodded Bob to the stern, waited until Andre had splashed
past them and settled himself in the bow, and then started to
paddle.
Without looking back, she remarked, "You'd better wear

something more tomorrow. You probably tan better than I do, but
with no hat and that T-shirt your • arms and face will be in pretty
bad shape before the day's over. You've been out of the sun for a
long time."
"Good point," Bob admitted. There was silence for several
minutes while the girl maneuvered the little craft forward and
backward, and turned it both ways at varying speeds. Finally she
handed the paddle back to Bob.
"It'll be easier from there," she assured him. He found no great
difficulty in mastering the little canoe, as his extensive experience
with rowboats was not wholly irrelevant—Newton's third law is
very, very general. The girl gave an occasional word of advice, but
on the whole he had no trouble making the little vessel behave.
"I don't see what Shorty has against this," he said at length.
The boy in front spoke without turning his head.
"I told you. He's stupid." Bob managed to contain his
amusement.
"You and Jenny must be good friends," Bob suggested.
"I've known Andre most of his life," the girl said. "I used to
baby-sit for him and his sisters. We're good friends most of the
time."
"He likes your boat, anyway."
"Don't you?"
"Sure. It's fine. It should do for the diving, too, if we have only
two people in it."
"If two go down, we'll need a third to handle the boat," Jenny
pointed out. Bob grew thoughtful, and was silent for a few
seconds.
"Well, we'll try," he said at length. "Anyway, the gear will be a
long time coming, I'm afraid."
"You're going to go diving? With suits?" Andre asked excitedly.
"I can handle the kayak. Let me be with you!"
"Maybe," Jenny said. "It's Bob's business. You'll have to
convince him he wants you. I can tell him how good you are with
the kayak, but you'll have to be careful not to spoil anything." Both
Bob and the Hunter could tell that some meaning lay under the
rather elaborate remark. Both tended to connect it with
Malmstrom's charges, of malicious mischief earlier in the day. It
was some time before they learned how wrong, and at the same
time how right, they were.
"Let Andre paddle now, if he wants," Bob said suddenly. He
handed the implement forward to Jenny, who passed it on. "The
sun's nearly down. Bring us ashore where we were, unless Jenny
wants the boat somewhere else."

The child obeyed silently. The Hunter knew why Bob had given
up the paddle; the fatigue had struck again. He was having trouble
holding on to the tool, to say nothing of driving the vessel with it.
They were half a mile from the beach; the alien hoped, somewhat
forlornly, that his companion would get enough rest in the few
minutes it would take to get ashore to permit normal operation as
far as the doctor's home.
Andre left as soon as they reached the shore, without helping
get the canoe out of the water. Jenny did this unassisted; Bob had
two reasons for not offering his muscles—she had, after all,
refused help before. The walk to the Seevers' was made slowly
and in silence; Bob had recovered a little, and hoped the girl
wasn't noticing his weakness. At any rate, she made no comment
on it.
It was getting dark now, and he needed no excuse to walk the
bicycle home instead of riding it up the northwest road.
The early part of the evening, while Daphne was still up, passed
without particular incident. The child noticed her brother's fatigue,
but he managed to pass it off by saying that he was out of
condition and had tried to get around too much of the island. Even
the Hunter had no moral objection to this. Daphne was not very
sympathetic, and both Bob and the Hunter foresaw some trouble if
the drug Seever had mentioned failed to come soon and do some
good.
When the child disappeared for the night, Bob made a fairly
complete report of the day's doings, not stressing the fatigue
attacks. His decision, now crystallized, to bring Jenny onto the
working team was approved by both parents—they did not feel
strongly either way about the girl herself, but were in favor of
anything that promised to speed up the project.
Mrs. Kinnaird asked whether her friend Evelyn Seever might
not also be included, and Bob admitted that the doctor had made
hints in the same direction. It would be nice, he granted, if the two
families were completely involved and free to discuss the problems
without the need for finding an excuse to exclude some of the
members.
"It's too bad Silly isn't older," he even admitted. "But at least,
there's a good excuse for easing her out of the way at night."
"Then you'll let Ben tell Ev?" his mother persisted.
"Well—I guess so." Bob's attitude, almost reflexive after more
than seven years, was yielding; but it was putting up a good fight.
"I've sent for a couple of those free-diving outfits," said Bob's
father, changing the subject. "We're going to have to improvise
something to keep the tanks charged, I expect. We have a

compressor for the pneumatic hammers and drills, but its
connections and controls will have to be played with a bit."
"You ordered two?" Bob asked as indifferently as he could.
"Of course. You weren't planning to dive alone, I trust." Strictly
out of kindness, the Hunter worked on Bob's facial capillaries to
forestall the blush which was obviously coming. The younger man
changed the subject, he hoped unobtrusively.
"I wonder how long they'll take to get here?"
"Don't hold your breath waiting. Even by air it's a long journey.
There's nothing more we can do about it for now. You said
something about getting hold of an old mine detector or something
of that sort, didn't you?"
"Yes. It could save a lot of time, if the things will work under
water."
"I don't think we'd have to send for that," said Arthur Kinnaird
happily. "Taro Tavake at the radio station can probably make one,
considering his war background in the Solomons. I'm positive he
knows how they work, from things he's said. I'll talk to him
tomorrow."
Bob was appropriately gratified. "Good," he said brightly. "That
seems to set us up for now. When the diving gear comes we'll
have to make more detailed plans, but that will be a while."
"One thing," his mother put in. "Once you start work, when do
you get all these things done? And who, besides your father, dives
with you? You'll both have working hours which won't leave very
much time free for this. Have you given any thought to taking Old
Toke into the secret and having him assign you the job of finding
spaceships? That would simplify a lot of things."
"We've thought of it and talked about it a lot, Mom. For now
we've decided against it—only partly because I'm so much against
telling anyone. Toke Thorvaldsen and his son both have a lot of
influence, since they are PFI, and the Hunter's regulations apply a
good deal more stiffly to people like them than they do to us."
"Even though it would improve our chances of saving your
life?" the woman insisted. "Believe me, we've thought it over,
Mom. There are risks each way, and I've settled which ones I
prefer. The Hunter agrees with me. I may be wrong, but that's the
way I want to play it."
"And, as you kindly refrain from pointing out, it is your own
game. Very well, Son, we'll try to play it on your side. You'll forgive
us for worrying."
5. When in Doubt, Ask
Jenny reached the boat at almost the same moment as Bob
and the Hunter. She nodded approvingly at his costume, almost

exactly like her own—slacks, long-sleeved shirt, coolie hat, and old
sneakers as protection against the coral. Unlike the man, she was
carrying a mesh bag containing fruit.
"I don't expect much trouble finding what I want," Bob said as
he noticed the food. "I wasn't counting on having to stay all day."
"I hope you're right," she answered, "but I'll still be happier if we
have it with us. Now, are you going to tell me what we're looking
for, or am I just the taxi driver?" She was letting Bob carry the
kayak this time and he was silent until it was in the water and they'
had climbed in. His first words were not an answer to her question.
"What did you find out from your father?"
"Nothing. I didn't ask him anything, and there's nothing in your
medical record that helps."
"You looked at it, then."
"I told you I would."
"All right, here's the deal. I'll tell you the whole story, taking my
chances that you'll decide I'm a fruitcake—only remember your
dad can back it all up—if you'll fill me in on this fire-lighting
business you started off with yesterday morning. I have to admit
I'm wondering about that. All right?"
"Then the question did mean something to you."
"It certainly did. It fits into what I have to tell you, if that helps."
Jenny paddled silently for several strokes, and when she spoke
it was not a direct answer.
"I wouldn't have said that was a fair deal for you if you hadn't
made that last remark," she said at last. "I never thought the fire
question was very important, though I've been wondering about
the answer for years. Maybe there's more to it than I thought,
though, if it ties into a life-and-death matter for you. Anyway,
here's the story from my side.
"I suppose you know the desChenes family—at least, you met
Andre yesterday. Their father used to be on a tanker crew, but
they gave him a shore job when his wife died seven years ago
having a baby. There are two older children—Andre is the first—
and a lot of us have taken care of them at one time or another. I'm
afraid we haven't done the best job in the world, because Andre, to
put it simply, is a-pure pest. He really likes to bother and even hurt
people. I know most kids go through that stage, but you expect
them to be long past it by the time they're eleven. I think he's over
the edge myself, but Dad says he's just had some unfortunately
timed shocks and should get over it.
"Anyway, he thinks practical jokes are funny— really practical
ones, like hot pennies down the neck trip-strings on stairs, not just
water buckets over the door. I've had one badly sprained ankle, at

least half a dozen falls that didn't do so much damage, and I've put
out three fires in the yard around his |house—never inside, to give
him credit. About four years ago—I was only fourteen, and it was
the first time I'd had the kids all by myself while Mr. desChenes
was at work—was the first of the fires, and of course I tried to
explain to him why that wasn't such a good idea. He told me very
solemnly that he really knew better. He didn't stop, though.
"The third time it happened, maybe a year and a half later, he
got burned himself—not seriously, but enough to show him what it
felt like. I thought the talking-to would really mean something that
time. He was very indignant, not with me but with the fire. He
insisted it wasn't fair that one person could play tricks with fire and
have fun, while someone else who did it got hurt. It took me a
couple of weeks, off and on, to find out what he was talking about.
At last he told me about seeing a big boy pour a lot of oil on the
ground and set fire to it, and seeing a car drive into the fire, and
the boy jump into the car and drive it out again. Later still, a couple
of years ago while you were home, I was with him and we
happened to see you. He said you were the big boy who made the
fire. I've never been sure what to believe, since his jokes
sometimes include pretty fancy lies, and I've been wanting to find
out ever since.
"There's one complication. As nearly as I could find out, this all
happened the day his younger sister was born and his mother
died. Maybe that's why it made such an impression on him, maybe
not. Maybe nothing of the sort happened at all, but I'd like to know.
I'm not especially fond of the kid, but it would be nice to unkink
him."
"It happened about that way," Bob said thought-fully. "Let's
see—he was about four years old then I didn't actually drive into
the fire, but he might have had a bad view, or might just not
remember." He fell silent; both he and the Hunter were badly
jolted. Neither had had the slightest suspicion that there had been
a witness to the settling of the earlier problem other than Bob's
father. Both were wondering how much of the story, and in what
distorted forms, had been spread among the younger fraction of
Ell's population.
"Too bad you didn't tell that to your father," Bob said at last. "I
don't know what sort of psychologist; he is, but at least you might
have known the facts be hind the story."
"Dad knows about it? He never—"
"He wouldn't. How could he? Yes, he knows."
"There's nothing about it in the folder he keeps on you."
"I know, Miss Secretary. I'll have to read that some time and

find out what you do know about me. The fire-lighting was not a
medical activity, and he has reasons for not writing down even all
of my medical problems."
"Which you are about to tell me, I take it."
"If you like. If you think you can believe him more easily than
you can me, go to your father and tell him I said he can tell you all
about the Hunter. Which do you want?"
"Start talking. I'll check your version against Dad's when I see
him."
The account took the rest of the journey to the small islet to
satisfy the girl's need for detail, though the basic story went quickly
enough. Her questions convinced the Hunter of what he had
strongly suspected earlier, Jenny was quicker-minded than his
own host. Naturally, she had trouble believing at first, and the alien
rather expected her to demand the sort of proof her father had
wanted years before. Instead, she made do with some very
penetrating and well-thought-out questions. Some of these, about
the alien's physical nature, Bob himself had never asked in the
nearly eight years of their association. Most of them reflected the
medical work she had been doing for her father, incidentally
showing that she had been reading much more than his case
records.. This surprised Bob, who was freshly enough out of
college to be inclined to look down on those who had not enjoyed
the ad-vantages of higher education.
"I didn't think she had all that," he muttered to his symbiont at
one point. "There was never any talk that I heard about her using
the college offer, or even going away from Ell for school." He was
tactful enough not to let his surprise get into his words, but the
Hunter could often detect it from his host's more subtle internal
reactions. It pleased the alien; his friend, he felt, was getting more
education, which was clearly needed.
The kayak was carried ashore and set well away from the
water, though they were on the lee side of Apu and there were no
waves to speak of from the la goon side. Apu was one of the
largest of the islets scattered along the Ell reef, and had collected
enough soil over the years to support not only underbrush, but
several palms. Very little of the peculiar vegetation from the
engineering laboratories, which covered so much of the long
northwest arm of the main island, had escaped this far.
There was a beach on the lagoon side, but the outer face
merged directly into the irregular, murderous coral of the reef itself,
dangerous for a swimmer on the quietest days and suicidal with
the slightest swell. The reef, defined as the region where coral
grew close enough to the surface to influence wave patterns, ex

tended hundreds of yards out to sea. It broke much of the violence
of incoming waves, but complicated their pattern so as to make it
impossible to tell when a particular spot along Apu's outer face
would be under water the next moment. The Hunter and Bob both
remembered vividly the time years before when Ken Rice had
gone down into one of the coral-rimmed bays to pick something
up, and nearly been drowned. The "something" had not been
recovered, but the Hunter had seen it clearly enough to identify a
generator shield which must have come from his quarry's ship, and
which had provided the first certainty that the other alien had come
ashore at all.
It was this object they were seeking, in the hope that it would
provide information which would narrow the search area for the
missing ship of the fugitive. It was this vessel which promised
more to the plan; the Hunter knew that his own vessel had been
crushed almost flat, and might have been too completely corroded
for detection even by the time the searchers might have come.
The shield, on the other hand, had appeared intact, giving some
promise that the ship it had come from had escaped such
complete destruction.
The search was not easy. Coral grows, and waves destroy; the
outer side of Apu had changed much. Bob and the Hunter
remembered roughly where the near-drowning had occurred, but it
took them more than fifteen minutes to narrow down to four the
possibilities among the endless bays and coves. Even then they
were far from sure; very close examination would be necessary.
They approached the first of these with caution; it was hurling
spray far above their heads at irregular intervals as waves focused
into it Neither Bob nor the Hunter could identify its interior details
with any certainty in the moments they could look. They had hoped
that the gleam of metal might be visible, but that was not really
reasonable after all these years. If this were the same notch,
conditions had changed. Then, the boys had gone into it without
hesitation; now, not even the most foolhardy of teen-agers would
have taken the chance. They stayed with it as long as they did
only because Jenny, who had only verbal description to go by kept
pointing at different features and asking whether this, or that, or
the other thing might possibly be what they wanted. Unfortunately,
while all were possibilities, none was encouraging enough to merit
close investigation in that welter of foam and sharp coral.
The second of the possible spots was much quieter and less
dangerous, but they spent even more time there. Several of the
coral masses might, as far as appearance was concerned, be
concealing the object of their search. Bob and Jenny had

swimming suits under their outer clothes, and both went into the
water to check these possibilities more closely. Bob of course
could see much better under water than the girl, since the alien
could extrude tissue to reshape his cornea for focusing in the
different medium, but even with this help no sign of metal was
detected. At the third bay, Bob's fatigue caught up with him
gain, and Jenny had to help him out of the water. On the theory
that food would provide energy, she insisted on his eating one of
the fruits she had brought, and this triggered the nausea of the day
before.
Jenny had not really accepted the fact that the situation was
really a life-and-death one as far as Bob was concerned. She felt
slightly superior about his need-for her help in the water, and was
even somewhat amused at the spectacle he made trying to eat.
Neither Bob nor his symbiont fully understood her.
Serious or not, however, she insisted on finishing the check-out
of the third cove by herself and, judging by the time she spent
under water, must have done a fairly thorough job. She tried to
make up for deficient underwater eyesight by using her sense of
touch, and emerged finally with several cuts on hands and fore
arms, inflicted by the coral.
Then she wanted to do the fourth site alone, though it was
much like the first in wave action.
"Don't be crazy!" Bob snapped when she made this proposal.
"It's as dangerous as the one we passed up, and I'm not in shape
to help you when you get in trouble. If we really knew the thing
was there it might be different, but we're not sure enough for that
sort of risk. Look from up here if you want, and tell us if you think
anything looks hopeful, and then we'll decide what to do; but I
think we're going to need that metal detector Dad is lining up even
for this part of the search. If you go in there, you'll have to stop
calling Shorty a nut."
"I suppose that's true," Jenny agreed reluctantly "but I thought
you considered this project important."
"I do. It's important enough not to lose any of the help. Get your
clothes on; we don't want to lose any-one to sunburn, either." The
redhead, in spite of her lifelong residence in the tropics, had skin
even paler than Bob's, though she was heavily freckled.
"Maybe the Hunter ought to stay with me for a while, and
protect the useful, member of the team," she suggested.
"He can't do anything about sunburn—he can't stand ultraviolet
even as well as we can," replied Bob.
"I was thinking about my hands," she retorted, looking at the
oozing scratches.

"Well, the Hunter might leave me while I'm awake now that I
know him so well, but he'd certainly wait until you were asleep
before he went to you. He has definite ideas about how people
who aren't used to symbiosis are likely to react to a puddle of
green jelly flowing toward them; and if they pull him apart trying to
get away while he's partly inside, he finds it more than
uncomfortable."
"Green jelly? Andre said something about—oh. I didn't—"
Jenny fell silent, her stomach suddenly feeling much like Bob's.
She donned her outer clothes, took a fruit from the bag, but then
appeared to change her mind about eating. She put it back,
thought for a few more seconds, and then spoke.
"What do you want to do now? Do you think a couple of hours
rest will get your muscles going again, as it did yesterday? Should
we stay here and look over more places after you're back on your
feet, or should I help you into the boat and take you back? Do you
really think we can accomplish anything here before we have the
metal-finder your father was going to get from Mr. Tavake?"
"We'll stay right here, if it's all right with you. I don't want half
the kids on Ell to see me in this state."
"I could take you to the creek mouth near your house."
"I don't want to take the chance. More and more people keep
learning about the Hunter, but I don't want it to get to the whole
island. I'll keep picking the recruits, and don't want spectators."
"Are you sorry you told me?"
"That's a loaded question, but—no. You know I'm not crazy,
and if you're still a little uncertain, your father will straighten you
out. I can stand having the word get to people who'll be helpful."
"Then you want to look around Apu some more after you can
walk, even if we don't have the detector."
"Right."
"And in the meantime we just wait here and toast." Jenny put
no question mark at the end of the sentence, and even the Hunter
could see that she had no intention of waiting. He had met
numerous human beings who would always be quite willing to sit
still and fill a time interval with pointless talk, but he could see that
Jenny Seever was not one of them.
She did sit quietly for a little while, thinking, but it was a matter
of minutes rather than hours. Then she stood up.
"I'm going to see Mr. Tavake and find out how long it will take
him to make that detector. Your father must have talked to him
about it by now. Do you want to wait here until I get back, or shall I
take you ashore near your house, or what?"
Bob sat up with an effort. "How are you going to ask him about

the detector without starting him wondering what we want it for?"
"Credit me with basic brains, even if I haven't been to an Ivy
League college, or whatever they call those places. Your father
must nave told him something; I don't have to know the reason at
all. Are you waiting or coming?"
"I'd better come along. Then if I get back in shape before you
show up again, I can do something useful."
"You could search out here."
"Don't rub it in." Bob didn't really like having the initiative taken
from him, as the Hunter could well see, but he was not so stupid
as to show his resentment. "Let's see if I can get to the boat under
my own steam. I know I won't be any help getting it into the water."
"No trouble." Jenny also had some basic tact. She made no
effort to help Bob to his feet, though it was plain to her that it was a
major struggle. Once up, he walked with less difficulty the thirty or
forty yards to the boat. The girl didn't wait for him, and had it in the
water by the time he arrived. He got in, still without help. Jenny
started paddling, heading for the mouth of the creek nearly two
miles away.
After a minute or two, Bob made a suggestion which the Hunter
was annoyed with himself for not originating.
"Wouldn't it be smarter if you headed for the nearest part of the
shore and then followed it along, in water shallow enough so I can
get out fast if I have to? If my stomach acts up again, there's no
reason I should mess up your boat."
"Cant you lean over the side?"
"Of course, but is it stable enough? I've been very careful about
trim."
"Well, you needn't be. It may not be as stable as an outrigger or
a cat, but I've gone in and out in deep water often enough. I told
you that. If you need convincing—" Jenny set down the double
paddle and, without bothering to remove her outer clothes, startled
her two passengers by going overside. The kayak rocked, but not
nearly as much as Bob expected; his reflexive grasp of the
coaming around the cockpit was superfluous.
A moment later the redhead surfaced. She grasped the floating
hat and handed it to Bob, then seized the coaming and drew
herself back aboard. This time the tip was greater, taking the side
of the little vessel under water; but the waves still failed to reach
the coaming, and the only water which entered the cockpit dripped
from Jenny's clothes. She resumed paddling without comment; her
passengers also found nothing to say.
She brought the kayak ashore at the mouth of the creek which
passed close to Bob's house, far enough up the little stream to be

out of sight except to boats well out on the lagoon. Bob managed
to get to his feet and disembark with less trouble than he had
experienced three quarters of an hour earlier.
''All right," Jenny said. "It will probably be quickest if I go and
borrow your bike—it's still at your house, isn't it? You walked down
to the boat this morning? Good—and used that to get to Tavake's
phone shack. Do you want to wait here, or get up to the house
yourself, or—"
"Hi, Bob! Did you find it?" Daphne's shrill voice cut into Jenny's
question, and a moment later the child herself appeared. Bob
asked the obvious question.
"What are you doing here, Silly? You don't go swimming alone,
especially here away from the beach, and I don't see any of your
friends."
"Oh, I saw you coming back long ago in Jenny's boat, and
wanted to ask if you'd had any luck. Are you going back out to the
little island, or did you find it? If you aren't and still have to look
somewhere else, can I go with you? I know Mother won't mind."
Jenny cut in before Bob could answer. "How did you know that
Bob was looking for something, Daphne?"
"He said so. That's why Mother said he'd be too busy to have
me along."
"Did he tell you what he was looking for?"
"No. It's his secret."
"But still you want to go along? How can you help if you don't
know what we're hunting?"
"You're not dressed to go with us," Bob interjected.
"I have my bathing suit on."
"What about the sun, small blonde idiot? We've been looking
mostly out on Apu, where there isn't any shade to speak of. That's
where you saw us coming from, wasn't it?"
"Then why is Jenny all wet? I can go into the water any time
you need, and I don't need sun clothes. I'm tan enough now."
The Hunter was getting impatient. It had been two years since
they had been on the island, and even that long ago Bob's sister
had been able to hold her own in a verbal duel with anyone but her
mother. Bob should have known better than to let this happen; he
should simply have said no. Unhuman as he was, the Hunter did
have emotions, some of them rather similar to those of his human
host. He finally yielded to the impatience.
"Which little finger is she wrapping you around this time?" were
the words that resonated in Bob's inner ears. He reacted, as the
Hunter should have foreseen, with irritation which was taken out
on the unfortunate child rather than on the alien critic.

"Look, Silly, Mother told you last night you couldn't come with
us, and you can't. We're busy, it's important for us to find this thing,
and I can't be distracted looking after you at the same time."
The response did not quite reach the level of tears, perhaps
because of the speed with which Jenny cut in. She may have
thought Bob was being too harsh, but it is likely that she also
wanted to retain some control of the situation.
"Look, Daphne," she said gently and persuasively, "Bob's right
about not having you come in the boat with us but maybe you can
help us here on shore. I can't tell you what the thing we're looking
for really is, because as you said it's a secret—I don't even know
myself. Bob couldn't tell even me." The Hunter was startled and
rather dismayed at this outright false-hood. "I can tell you what it
looks like, though, the way Bob told me. Then you can keep your
eyes open for it and tell us if you ever see it. Remember, though,
it's a secret; you must promise not to tell any of your friends."
"Sure. How about Mother and Dad?"
"They know already. You can mention it to them if you like,"
Bob assured her. The Hunter was not he approved of Bob's tacit
acceptance of the falsehood, but refrained from saying anything to
his host, as the latter went on with the description of the generator
case.
It's like half a silver ball, about so big." He held his slightly
cupped hands about eight or nine inches apart. "It's not really
shiny like a mirror—more like our kitchen knives. The flat side is
partly covered by the same silvery stuff, but you can see it's
hollow."
"Oh, I know what you mean," Daphne explained excitedly. "It's
mostly grown over with coral, isn't it?" Jenny did not know what to
say, Bob for some seconds was unable to speak, and the Hunter
was not sure he was hearing correctly.
"It could be," Bob said at last. "You've seen something like
that? When were you out on Apu?"
"Never. It isn't there. It's on top of a book case in the library; it's
been there for years."

6. The Moral of a White Lie

The fact that neither Bob nor the Hunter could accept the face
value of Daphne’s statement carried no weight at all; Jenny was in
control. Paying no attention to Bob's expression, which was rather
ambiguous anyway, she congratulated Daphne for solving the
problem, asked her to lead the way, suggested that they stop at
the Kinnaird's to get bicycles, and explained that Bob would have

to wait by the boat to meet someone.
The girl's indifference to the truth or falsehood of what she said
was bothering the Hunter more, and more. The long average life of
his species had made it a matter of common knowledge, many
generations before, that even the most trivial lie is eventually
revealed for what it is; it comes home to roost, because the false
information leaves a trail through so many memories.
But Jenny seemed to have no scruples at all about tampering
with facts in order to achieve even a short-term end. Worse still,
the Hunter's host, while obviously very annoyed, seemed to be
more bothered by the girl's assumption of command than by
anything else. The feeling of futility which so often drives an
immature human being into a temper tantrum was as close to
taking over as it ever had been in one of the alien's species. Since
Bob was still overcome by his fatigue, neither of them could go
with the girls to the library; they-could not use the boat, not that
there seemed much need to; they couldn't save time by checking
up on the metal-finder while Jenny went with Daphne, as she so
clearly intended to do—and both Bob and the Hunter were sure
they would still need the finder, even for the shield. They did not
know what Daphne was talking about, but neither believed it was
the real object of their search; though, to make matters even more
annoying, they knew they would have to get to the library
themselves sooner or later to make certain. In fact, this would
have to precede any useful work, since Jenny appeared to be
taking Daphne's report entirely uncritically, and would accept
nothing less than a direct examination by Bob and the Hunter as
grounds for denying it.
All the partners could do was wait, worry, and wonder.
Perhaps the worst part was the impossibility of ignoring the chance
that the child might be right— which would force extensive re-
planning. The library was some two miles away, south of the main
road and a little east of where this was joined by the one from the
dock. The girls would have to cover the first half mile to Bob's
house on foot. Bob wasn't wearing his watch, since it was not
waterproof, and they could only guess how long they had been
gone. Without saying anything, the Hunter was wondering whether
the annoyance would trigger Bob's stomach troubles. That would
at least have taken care of the boredom for a while, but he was not
really sorry that it failed to happen.
In fact, the girls were back in little more than half an hour,
though it naturally seemed much longer. Their voices, well before
they arrived, indicated that the enthusiasm was still boiling, and
Daphne cried out to her brother the moment they came in sight.

"It's still there! Jenny says that must be it! We tried to find out
where it came from, but all anyone could tell us was that they
thought Maeta had found it before the library was built, and
brought it in for decoration when she started working there. She
wasn't there today, and wasn't home, we asked as we went by and
they said she was out on the water with friends, and she never
said where she got it, but we ought to go back and wait for her to
come home, and—"
"Throttle back, little one. There are at least four Maetas on the
island. I suppose, since you talk about her house being 'on the
way,' you mean Charlie Teroa's sister, but I didn't know she
worked at the library."
"She does. Also for Dad, sometimes," Jenny affirmed.
"But I still want to see this thing for myself," Bob said firmly,
"before I go asking Maeta or anyone else where it came from.
Jenny, you never saw the thing we're looking for, and you can't
possibly be really sure that this is it." Bob was looking at the older
girl as he spoke, but paid no attention to her expression—the
eyeballs-rolled-to-the-sky one established by Earth's visual
entertainment industry as indicating that some-thing of incredible
stupidity has just been uttered.
"You went off too fast for me to point that out, Silly. Now I've
got to go myself sometime—"
"Well, go ahead," retorted his sister. "We saw Andre coming
away from there, and Jenny said he was the one you were waiting
here for. But he wasn't headed this way, so you don't have to wait
here. Come on back now."
"What?—Oh, I see—well, I don't—" Bob was completely lost for
the moment, and even the Hunter had not expected Jenny's
fabrications to come home quite so soon. The redhead covered
quickly, however, demonstrating an ability which the Hunter was
beginning to feel might not be so desirable after all. Quick wit was
one thing, but if its owner used it only for keeping lies more or less
up to date it might not be available for more serious matters.
"If Andre was going toward the dock, Bob and I can meet him
with the boat," Jenny said quickly.
"You take Bob's bike back home, and then wait for us if you
like library. We may be pretty late getting there, though, so if you
want to do something else, don't wait too long."
"All right." The small brown figure with the almost-white pigtails
disappeared up the path without argument. Jenny turned to Bob
and the Hunter, but spoke only to the former.
"You get back in the boat. I have something to say to you." Her
tone was clearly, even to the Hunter, expressive of extreme

annoyance. Nothing else was said until they were afloat and
reasonably out of ear-shot of land; then she went on, "You didn't
say any-thing about these medical problems affecting your brain. I
never saw anyone so slow on the uptake. Do you really want your
kid sister chasing around after us on this job?"
"No, of course not."
"Then why didn't you let me convince her that we'd found the
thing, and send her off investigating Maeta's past or whatever else
might amuse her and keep her out of trouble—and out of our
hair?"
"You mean you know that isn't the casing?"
"How would I know? It does fit the description as far as I can
tell, but I've never seen the real thing— as you had to go and point
out to the kid. Why didn't you go along with my line?"
Bob answered with unusual speed and vehemence.
"Partly because you're right—I'm slow on the up-take. Partly
because even if I'd seen what you were up to, or rather been sure
of it, I'd still be worried about being around when she learned the
truth. I don't want anyone, least of all any of my own family, to be
in a position to call me a liar."
"Of course not." Jenny seemed surprised at Bob's seriousness.
"Of course no one likes to tell a real lie, but she wouldn't find out
until she was older, and you could explain why we'd done it. She'd
take it all right. And isn't it important that we get on with this job,
without having to baby-sit the kid at the same time? Look, Bob,
unless you've been lying too, you’re dying. This is serious. Are a
couple of white lies really more important than that?"
Bob made no answer. The Hunter could have provided him with
a full-length speech on the subject, but Jenny's words had forced
even him to realize that he hadn't thought of the situation quite that
way. He had, after all, been willing to bend regulations in the
interest of saving his host's life—though there had been other
matters of principle which had helped with the bending—and with
a short-lived species such as Bob's perhaps lying wasn't quite so
serious. He was still un-sure of the answer, though not very much
inclined to change his long-term attitude, when Bob finally spoke
again.
"We'd better head for the library. Do you have a story ready to
cover this meeting with Andre we're supposed to have had—
especially if she's met him and mentioned it to him?"
"No, but I'll manage. She's not suspicious, if you mean your
sister."
"I do. Not yet." The last two words were pointedly rather bitter,
and even Jenny caught their implication. Nothing more was said

during the mile and a quarter paddle until near the end, when they
saw Daphne waiting for them on the beach by the causeway.
"I suppose you'll tell her it's not the right thing, when you see
it." Jenny's tone was more resigned than indignant.
"I'll tell her whether it is or isn't, according to what I see. I
appreciate your worry about my health, Jen, but there are some
things I can't see doing. I'll kid young Silly in situations we both
know aren't serious, and she knows I will, but real out-and-out
lying on important matters—no. Maybe I care too much about what
she thinks of me after she finds out, but that's the way I feel.
Maybe I've been living with the Hunter too long."
"Thanks," the alien muttered.
"Why should she ever have to find out?" asked Jenny, quite
seriously.
"Maybe you haven't been living with the Hunter long enough,"
was Bob's answer. They were ashore by then, and the child was
running toward them across the sand.
Bob was not completely restored, but was able to get to the
library without letting his condition become obvious to Daphne.
Both he and the Hunter were worrying about the other possibility,
but nothing more had happened to his stomach since they had left
Apu; and now, fortunately, his stomach was practically empty.
The library was a surprisingly large structure, considering the
general environment. The reason was another of PFI's policies.
Employees' children not only had the option of a college education
at company expense, in return for the work contract afterward; the
company also covered book expenses, but required that the books
come back to the island afterward. Thorvaldsen was not really
trying to start a college on Ell, he insisted, but he wanted for both
himself and everyone else on the island good access to as much
of human culture, as possible. It was said that he had once read all
the nasty things ever said about capitalists and had set out to
prove that none of them had to be true. Whatever his intentions,
Ell's population formed a generally well read group, from the
relatively few pure-blooded Polynesians, through the mixtures
which formed the majority, to the relatively few pure-blooded
Europeans. It was also a prosperous population; PFI oil had made
the island dependent on the rest of the world for everything but
food, but no one was worried; it was likely to be a long time before
the oil market failed. Even the foresighted ones who felt that man
should shift to nuclear power because of the probable effects of
carbon-burning on the planet's climate admitted that PFI was
taking as much carbon dioxide from the environment as its
customers were putting in.

In any case, the library was large and accessible. It was open,
with people on duty, every day from sunrise to three hours after
sunset.
The librarian on duty at the moment was a middle-aged woman
unknown to the Hunter, though Bob was able to call her by name.
"Hi, Mrs. Moetua. Did my pile of books get here?"
The woman looked up and nodded, without interrupting work on
a card she was typing. Then she saw Daphne and glanced toward
one of the cases; she was the one who had borne the brunt of the
little girl's questioning a short time before, and could guess why
the group was there. She swung her gaze back to Daphne, who
caught her eye and lowered her voice to a whisper as she led the
others toward her discovery.
It was well above eye level even for Bob and Jenny, on top of a
case of encyclopedias, and certainly from distance answered the
verbal description which Bob had supplied and his sister modified.
It was half hidden by the coral which had grown around it in a
complex pattern which fully justified its present use as an
ornament.
However, enough of the underlying alloy could be seen to make
recognition easy, and Bob and the Hunter looked at it for only a
few moments. Neither had any doubt about its identity. The Hunter
would have liked to examine it more closely, as a feature he had
not noticed in the brief glimpse seven years before now caught his
attention, but he decided to wait —Bob was heading back toward
the librarian's desk by now, and the alien decided to let him finish
what-ever he had in mind.
"You told Daphne that Maeta Teroa brought that thing in?"
"I said I thought she did," the woman replied. "That's still the
way I remember it. It's been here as long as the building, but so
has Maeta, and I'm not absolutely sure. She isn't here today, but
shouldn't be hard to find. Why are you interested?"
"I saw something like it years ago out on the reef, and
wondered if this might be the same thing. It's certainly curious; I
wonder it didn't go out with Museum Exchange."
"They don't get everything," the woman smiled. "Don't make
remarks about the Exchange if you want Mae to help you. She
does a lot of collecting for them, and we have a lot of stuff here—
books and specimens both—as a result."
"Thanks, I'll be careful. I didn't mean to sound critical; I have
some minerals at the house which I got from a German museum
through that outfit, when I was on my rock-loving bug years ago. I'll
ask Mae when I see her; thanks, Mrs. Moetua."
Outside, Bob turned to the girls.

"That saves a lot of time. Silly, I'll have to think of a real prize
for you; start making a list of things you want."
"It really is the thing?" Jenny asked.
"It really is—if you can believe me." The young woman had the
grace to blush, but kept on with her questions.
"What can we do now?"
"We'll have to get Maeta to tell us as exactly as possible where
she found it, so we can try backtracking the way we'd planned."
"What do you mean?" asked Daphne. "Backtracking what?"
"Part of the secret," replied her brother. "Maybe I can tell you
later, but I don't promise. You may as well go off and play. There's
nothing we can do until I see Maeta, so you won't miss anything.
They said she was out on the water?" Both girls nodded
affirmatively. "All right. I suppose we could go out in the boat again
and try to spot her, but the chances wouldn't be very good—she
could be picnicking on any of the islets, even around on the south
side, and not just cruising around the lagoon. She could even be
fishing or sailing outside the reef."
"But it wouldn't hurt to go see, and you could take me with you
in the boat," pointed out Daphne.
Bob looked at Jenny, who smiled and shrugged.
"All right, small sister, if you get on your bike, dash home, and
put on something sun proof over that scrap of tape you call a
bathing suit. Scoot!"
The child vanished.
The rest of the day was spent, not very productively, on the
lagoon. Daphne enjoyed herself, and even the older human beings
had a good time, but the Hunter was impatient and bored. He
could not, in spite of his long life and general tendency toward
calm, understand how Bob could apparently put the problem of his
own life so casually and completely out of mind. Granted that the
trouble was the Hunter's fault, it was Bob's life. It did occur to the
alien that this might be another consequence of the relatively short
human life span; but that could not be the whole story. The
Castorian humanoids he knew lived an even shorter time on the
average and he doubted that any of these could have been so
casual in such a situation. Certainly none of the individuals he had
known personally would have been.
Since most of Ell ate the evening meal shortly after sundown,
there was no great difficulty about intercepting Maeta at her home.
Daphne had been sent off with the message that her brother would
be home a few minutes later; Jenny accompanied him to the home
of the Teroas, who lived in the middle of a fairly extensive garden
just at the point where the roads met, and only a few score yards

from the library.
Bob and Jenny were greeted cordially. Charles, the son of the
family, had been one of Bob's close friends for many years. He
and his father were at sea just now, as usual, and the older sister
was working in the Tahiti office of PFI, but Maeta, her mother, two
of the latter's sisters and a brother-in-law were all there. More
time than Bob would have wished was consumed in answering
their questions about his college life—not the sort of questions a
Boston or New York provincial would have expected from
Polynesians. For once, the Hunter was not bored by human
conversation, even though it had no connection with his problem.
It did take a while to steer the talk toward the object in the
library, but Bob eventually succeeded, Maeta nodded when he
mentioned Daphne's calling attention to it, and admitted, with no
particular surprise at the question, that she was the donor of the
ornament. When he asked where she had found it she did show a
polite curiosity about the reason for his interest, and he told the
partial truth that he had used before.
"I thought I saw it in the water years ago, but never tried to
collect it," he said. "It was on the outer side of Apu, and I didn't
want to be served up as hamburger. You must have had a very
calm day, or else you are an awfully good swimmer."
One of the aunts chuckled. "Maeta is a better swimmer and a
better sailor than any man on Ell." The girl accepted the
compliment with a nod, and Bob remembered hearing something
similar from Charles in the past. It was quite believable; her
strength was not obvious to the eye, but her coordination was,
whenever she moved. Bob did not consciously look at her
particularly, but Jenny felt that he was and, to her own surprise,
she felt a bit annoyed about it. It would not have been surprising if
he had; Maeta Teroa might not have been better looking than
Jenny, who had a high and quite justified opinion of her own
appearance, but she was at very little disadvantage compared to
the much taller redhead. Maeta was just over five feet tall,
weighing just over a hundred pounds. Names meant little on Ell as
far as ancestry was concerned; she showed her Polynesian
background in her brown skin and black hair, but Europe—
Scotland, Charles had once mentioned —was visible in her blue
eyes and relatively straight nose and pointed chin.
"I won't argue," she said in response to the aunt's compliment.
"One doesn't contradict one's elders even to be modest, and I'm
not that modest. There really wasn’t any risk, though, Bob; I didn't
find it on Apu. I spotted it from the Haerehaere on the bottom of
the lagoon at least a mile from there—oh, about midway between

Tanks Seven and Twelve, as I remember. I was a little surprised to
see such a growth there—it's a species you expect out in the
reef—so I went down to get it. It was pretty, and I didn't let it go to
the Exchange, but kept it at home. When the new library was
finished and I started working there I took it over—we all helped
decorate the place. I've never figured out how it got so far from the
reef. I thought at first that someone had found it there and dropped
it overboard bringing it in, but, I couldn't see why the person didn't
get it back, in that case. It was in less than twenty feet of water.
Besides, you'd think that any previous owner would have noticed
when it appeared in the library; there can't be many people, on the
island who haven't seen it there."
The Hunter put a question to Bob which puzzled him, but the
young man passed it on as his own.
"Did you improve on it any? That is, did you break off any of the
coral to make it look prettier, or is it just the way you found it?"
"I certainly didn't. I can't see anything pretty about a broken
coral branch, and I remember how glad I was that all the branches
were whole. As far as I know it's still that way, though I haven't
looked closely at it for a long while. I meant to ask Dad or Charlie
what the piece of machinery inside it might be—I suppose it must
have come from some ship—but I never happened to think of it
while they were around. Maybe you know? You were looking at it
today."
"I don't know that much about ships, I'm afraid," Bob evaded.
The Hunter prompted him again. "Would you come and look at it
with me again some time, and tell me whether it's changed any?"
"Of course." Maeta was clearly puzzled by his interest, but was far
too polite to ask for an explanation if Bob didn't volunteer one. "I
can't go right now —we're about to have dinner—but afterward if
you like. You'll stay and eat with us?"
Bob and Jenny made the standard courtesies about being
expected at their homes, and left after agreeing to meet Maeta at
the library the next morning. Outside, the Hunter asked why Bob
hadn't arranged the examination for that night,
" I doubt they'll really be through eating before the library closes
up," he answered, "and I certainly wouldn't want to seem in a hurry
to leave the meal, or to hurry them away from it by coming back
later." Jenny, who of course had heard nothing of this exchange,
interrupted it by asking Bob the purpose of the question about the
coral.
"I don't know," he had to answer. "The Hunter fed them to me,
and I was passing them on for him."
"Without knowing why?"

"There was no way to ask him without being obvious about it. I
don't have to speak out loud—he can feel the tension in my vocal
cords when I'm not quite speaking—but I'd have had to pause in
my other conversation, and people would have noticed."
"Well, why not ask him now?"
"How about it, Hunter?" The alien had no reason to hold back.
"I thought I saw a regularity in the coral arrangement when we
were in the library. I'm not sure enough to want to be more explicit
until we have another look, and get Maeta's assurance that its
present condition either is or isn't the way it was when she first
noticed it. Also, I'd like to see if either of you notices anything
when you see it next time, so I'd rather not tell you what to look
for." Bob relayed this to the girl. Neither was particularly satisfied,
and Jenny kept trying to persuade the Hunter to say more all the
way to her house. Bob knew better, so the conversation was less
strained the rest of the way to his own home.
Predictably, his strength was back to normal when he woke up
the next morning. However, a new complication had developed in
the form of extreme pain in his joints, especially knees and ankles.
As usual, the Hunter could find no specific cause, certainly nothing
as clear-cut as the crystals of uric or oxalic acid of gout. The
Hunter looked for these with especial care; he had persuaded Bob
to take a course in human physiology, and had been very
conscientious in doing his host's reading with him.
Presumably one of the plates he was juggling, most probably a
hormone, was wobbling in its flight, but the presumption was not
very helpful. Bob was extremely uncomfortable physically, but
seemed to be getting more philosophical as his condition grew
worse. He was quite calm, and showed no signs of blaming the
Hunter. The latter, on the other hand, felt himself being driven
closer and closer to panic by the combination of guilt and
helplessness. He knew that panic could hardly be expected to
help, but it attacks on a level far below the reach of intelligence.
Bob was able to move around, however uncomfortably, and ate
breakfast with the family without finding it necessary to tell them
about the new trouble. Daphne, luckily, had plans to spend the day
with friends of her own age, and presented no problem.
Bob and his companion left by bicycle as soon as the meal was
over. Nothing had been specifically said about Jenny's being with
the party, but she was waiting in front of her house as they
passed, and fell in beside them on her own machine for the short
remaining distance to the library.
Maeta had not yet arrived, but must have seen them pass her
home; they had to wait only two or three minutes for her. They

entered the building together, and the smaller woman spoke briefly
to the librarian on duty, not Mrs. Moetua this time. Then she led
the way to the case on which the coral-encrusted generator
housing stood, and gestured to Bob to lift it down—she herself
could not reach it. Jenny, for reasons she probably could not have
stated clearly herself, reached it first and carried it, still at Maeta's
direction, to a table near the door, where sunlight fell directly on it.
They all bent over to examine it closely.
There was no doubt in either Bob's or the Hunter's minds about
its being the same object they had seen Apu years before. This
was no longer the main question. Bob and Jenny were trying to
see what might have caught the Hunter's notice the day before;
Maeta, who had no reason to expect anything special, simply
reexamined it with interest.
About a third of the metal surface was exposed, and about as
much more was so thinly covered with marine growth that its
underlying shape was still plain. From the rest, the limy branches
grew in random contortions which even the alien found decorative;
the branches were covered with the ribbed cups that had once
contained living polyps. On the bare metal were patterns of fine
scratches which were perfectly legible to the Hunter, though only
their essential regularity was apparent to the human beings. .
The mere fact that the manufacturer's name, serial number,
and various sets of mounting and servicing instructions were
present was not the peculiarity which had caught the Hunter's
attention the day before. Far more surprising to him was the
uniformity with which each of these areas of engraving was ex-
posed to view. There were no partly hidden words or phrases or
numbers. Each symbol or group of symbols was completely free of
coral and other growth, as was the metal for several millimeters
around it. The coral did not seem to have been broken away, but it
might possibly have been dissolved.
After waiting for some minutes for his host to notice this, the
Hunter posed several leading questions. These also failed to bring
Bob's attention to the strange regularity, and the alien finally gave,
up and pointed it out. Then, of course, it was perfectly clear to the
man, and he couldn't understand why he had failed to notice it
before.
"Well, you see it now," said his symbiont. "Now let's find out if it
was that way when Miss Teroa found it, or if it has become that
way since." He left Bob with the problem of executing this simple
request.
Logically, the man started with the most general questions
possible.

"Mae, are you sure nothing has changed about this thing since
you found it?"
"Not perfectly sure, but it definitely hasn't changed very much.
Certainly no branches are broken. I admit I don't remember either
the exact branch pattern or the arrangement of the patches of bare
metal well enough to draw a picture, but if either of these has
changed, I don't think it can be very much, either."
"The metal looks the same?"
"As far as I can remember. I'm afraid metal is just metal to me,
unless it has a real color like copper or gold."
Bob saw no choice other than to get specific. "I was
wondering about the scratches on the metal. They seem to be only
on the bare parts—they never run out of sight under the coral. Of
course there may be some scratches entirely under it, but it looks
sort of as though someone had been making marks on the steel or
whatever it is after the coral had grown."
"I see what you mean." Maeta nodded thoughtfully. "I don't
remember really noticing the scratches before; maybe someone
has been at it. I doubt it, though. The case it's been on is pretty
high for young children to reach, and I don't think an adult would
spoil it that way." Maeta, like Jenny, had not taken the college
option, and for a brief moment Bob was startled by her naivety. He
made no comment, however, even to the Hunter.
They moved around the table, examining the object from all
sides. If any bit of the engraving was hidden at all, it was
completely hidden, as Bob had said. This, the Hunter felt sure,
could not possibly be a matter of chance; and from the near
despair of that morning, when Bob had awakened with the joint
pains, the Hunter suddenly felt happier than he had in two Earth
years. Perhaps that was why he made a mistake.
"Bob," he said. There can't be any doubt. It can't
be an accident. Those areas were uncovered carefully, using acid,
to let someone read the engraving, and only my own people could
either have expected to find anything to read or have counted on
understanding it after it was uncovered!"
It was a forgivable mistake—not the logic, which was perfectly
sound, but the failure to see the results of the remark. After all,
Bob had seemed to be taking the situation very calmly—
unbelievably calmly. If the young man's physical condition had
been normal, the Hunter might have been able to spot the
emotional tension of his host; but since the alien himself was
handling, more or less directly, most of the hormone systems
which emotion tends to affect, he had failed to do so. Bob's
reaction took both of them by surprise.

"Then they are here!" he exclaimed happily—aloud. Jenny
understood, naturally. Maeta, just as naturally, didn't, and was
understandably surprised.
"Who is here?" she asked. "You mean you recognize the sort of
ship this came from? That doesn't prove anything—I found this
years ago, remember."
Bob covered fairly well, but not perfectly. "That's true," he
admitted. "I wasn't thinking for the moment. Can you remember
just when that was? You told us pretty well where."
The young woman was silent for some time, the rest watching
with varying degrees of patience.
"Let's see," she said slowly at last. "The library was finished
early in '51—I remember because I started to work here after
school, as soon as it opened, and my first working day was my
sixteenth birthday. I'd had this thing quite a while then. A year? No,
longer. I never went out in the Haerehaere very often—the first
time I was only twelve, and that was the year you came home so
early and stayed so long, and when Charlie got his first ship job."
Bob nodded encouragingly, but managed to keep quiet this
time. The year he had "stayed so long" was
the one in which the Hunter's first problem had been solved. Maeta
went on.
"It must have been some time in March, either '48 or '49—oh, I
remember. I'd been taking care of your sister a lot, and she was
walking then, so it must have been March of '49, a little over five
years ago."
"Good. Beautiful. Thanks a lot."
"So they, whoever they are, may have been here then, but they
don't have to be here now," finished Maeta.
But Bob and the Hunter were sure they knew better.

7. Joke

"Bob, have you time to give us some help?"
The Hunter and his host were both startled. They were still
standing around, the table which bore the generator case, but
there had been several minutes of silence. Everyone had been
pursuing his or her own line of thought, some of which had led
pretty far from Ell. Maeta's question had not been an interruption,
however, since neither Bob nor the Hunter had found a really
promising line of thought to follow.
"I guess so," Bob answered. "What is it?"
"Those books you brought back have been brought to the
library, and we have to catalog and shelve them. Can you help

with the sorting? I'll recognize subjects all right; but we like to have
some estimate of scope and difficulty. You've read them—I
suppose."
"For the most part," Bob grinned. "All right, I might as well.
Jenny, you want to stay and help?"
"No, thanks, I'm not at home in college books, and might feel
lost—at least, I wouldn't be much help. I'll go ask Mr. Tavake that
question we didn't get around to yesterday."
"All right, good idea." Bob read nothing between the lines of her
refusal to stay. "Will you be home afterward? I think it's time we
talked things over with your father. The next part of the job won't
be easy even if Tavake comes through."
Jenny hesitated a moment; the Hunter assumed, she had made
other plans and was weighing their importance. Bob gave no
thought to the pause.
"All right," she finally said. "I'll see you—when? A couple of
hours, Mae?"
"The whole job will take days, but that much will get us
started," the older girl replied. "If this other thing you're talking
about is important, my job can wait—or I can do it all myself,
though probably not as accurately."
"We're hung up for the moment on our thing, anyway," Bob
assured her. Even the Hunter knew that both Bob and Maeta were
merely being polite. He was much less sure about Jenny.
Unavoidably, Bob stayed and the redhead departed.
Maeta led the way downstairs. The book crates had been
placed beside a large table in a basement room. While it was not
regularly used by the library patrons, the walls were lined with
partly filled bookshelves. The table was loaded with pots of
adhesive, scissors, tape, and similar library equipment, and one
corner of the room was occupied by a large, very comfortable-
looking armchair with a small table beside it. Maeta looked at
these and smiled.
"This was set up as a study for Mr. Thorvaldsen when the
library was built, but he fell asleep in the chair so often that he
decided to use his old place in the laboratory building. We've taken
it over for book processing. How many do you think you have
here?"
"Don't remember exactly. They're not all course texts. I was told
I could buy other stuff which was recommended to us as reference
material; that's why I can't say I've read every last page of it. I
guess the easiest thing is to get it all out on the table and start
sorting by subject, unless librarians have some more; ingenious
way of doing it."

Maeta glanced at him, but had nothing to say to his closing
remark, and they started as he had suggested. The girl worked
quickly and efficiently, and made good use of Bob's knowledge.
She said nothing about the remarks Bob and Jenny had made
while they were upstairs, but the Hunter felt sure she was thinking
about them. The young woman was obviously far too intelligent not
to be curious. The alien was thinking about her more and more as
the morning wore on, not only about her evident brains but also
about her competence—remarked upon the night before—on and
in the water. She could be useful, if Bob's prejudices could be
submitted to another blow.
But Bob was getting harder to persuade with each new recruit.
It might be necessary to manage Bob for his own good. Jenny
would be willing to do that, in principle; but of course there was
some difficulty in speaking to Jenny. The Hunter thought deeply,
and did not regard the library session as time wasted.
For most of the two hours, Maeta said nothing not directly
connected with the job, but just before the session ended she
changed the subject briefly.
"Bob, did you say anything to Jenny which could make her
think you were laughing at her, or looking down at her, because
she hadn't been to college?"
"Not that I can remember. I certainly didn't mean to." Bob's
surprise was quite genuine. "What makes you ask?"
"I know she's sensitive about not getting accepted by any
college and something she said when she was leaving a while ago
made me wonder whether you'd twisted the knife."
"Well, I never thought about it. I didn't even know she'd applied
for a college. Why should staying here bother her? Lot's of people
don't go—you didn't, and you're older than she is, and it doesn't
seem to bother you. Shorty didn't, and it certainly doesn't bother
him!"
"Shorty? Oh, the Malmstrom boy." That was an interesting way
to put it, since Malmstrom was three years or so older than Maeta.
“I don't know much about him. I never applied to a college, and
didn't have to face a rejection. I'm perfectly happy here. I like to
learn things, and in this library I'd be lifetimes just catching up with
what's available. There's just nothing else I want which might take
me away from Ell. But Jenny isn't that way, and please be careful
what you say to her."
"All right Thanks for telling me."
Bob took Maeta's admonition at face value, but the Hunter felt
there must be something behind it. He tried to puzzle out the
possibilities as they went upstairs. Perhaps Maeta felt genuinely

protective about Jenny; the redhead was younger, though only by
a year or so. She might, on the other hand, be more concerned
with Bob and his tendency to be just a little too pleased with his
brand new degree, a tendency of which the Hunter was quite
aware. He could see no reason why Maeta should be particularly
interested in Bob—or rather, while he could see one, he
considered it unlikely on such short acquaintance. He had heard it
said that females had a general tendency to try to remold any
available males, but since the speakers had always been males,
he had placed little weight in the claim. He considered it
biologically unlikely that there would be major psychological
differences between the two human sexes, other than
superimposed cultural ones.
He would probably have dismissed the question as both
unimportant and insoluble anyway, even if his attention had not
been sharply distracted.
Bob had used his bicycle for the mile-and-a-half trip from his
house. Maeta had accompanied them to the library door, though
she was planning to go back to do more work on the books, and
Bob was looking back to utter conventional farewells as he swung
aboard his machine. A second later he was sprawled on the
concrete.
The Hunter had the damage categorized at once; his host had
severe scrapes on the left knee, shoulder, and elbow. He was not
quite so quick at deciding how much repair and protection to
supply. Had Bob been alone, he would not have lost a drop of
blood; but Maeta and the other witnesses who had immediately
collected might not be able to believe that anyone could suffer
such a fall with no damage. Perhaps the Hunter should allow him
to bleed a little—not enough to cause real damage, of course—for
the sake of appearances.
On the other hand, the concept of "luck" was widely accepted
among human beings, he reflected, and he had noticed that many
of the species could dismiss the most incredible events from their
minds simply by using this word. The Hunter decided to take the
chance. He followed his natural inclinations, sealed off all blood
leaks, and got to work on the microorganisms they had picked up.
His partner, surprised, though he was, had picked himself up
before anyone actually reached him. His first reaction was one of
extreme embarrassment, not helped by the words of one of the
juvenile witnesses.
"You'd think anyone would look where be was going on a bike,
even with a girl around, wouldn't you?"
"I was just-" Bob stopped talking at once, realizing there was

nothing he could possibly say which would not furnish more
ammunition for a ten-year-old.
"What happened, Bob?" Maeta had returned by now. "Are you
hurt?"
"Not physically. My ego will take some repair. I don't really
know what happened; the bike just went out from under me."
Everyone, including the children who had gathered, clustered
more closely to look at the machine was nothing obviously wrong
until Bob cautiously mounted it again, and eased it gently forward.
Then it was obvious to all that the handlebars and the front wheel
were no longer aligned with the bar straight across, the wheel
pointed noticeably to the right. This would ordinarily have made no
difference; a cyclist's reflexes operate off in put from the inertial
senses and the general visual picture of the terrain. He doesn't
keep looking at the front wheel to see where he is going next. In
this in stance, however, Bob had not really started to roll when he
had put his weight on the left pedal and started to swing his right
leg across. He had not noticed the change in the handlebar-wheel
relationship before he started to move. Naturally he had started a
frantic left turn as he began to fall, but the bicycle was moving far
too slowly for this to be effective, and with the wheel near ninety
degrees, the entire machine had slid from under him, as he had
said.
"A smart person keeps his bike tightened up," remarked the
youngster who had spoken before.
"Quite right," Bob agreed, paying no more attention to him. "I'm
OK, Mae. See you later." He remounted the machine and started
down to the road, not looking back this time.
"Shouldn't you tighten it up?" the Hunter asked, "We have tools,
don't we?"
"Sure, in the case," was the reply. "It isn't loose, though."
"But—" The Hunter stopped talking as his mind drew too far
ahead of his words.
"Yeah. But. We'll think it over later on." There was no time for
more conversation, even if there had been thought to feed it. The
journey to the Seevers' was short, and they had already arrived.
Jenny met them at the door. If she had been unhappy about
anything when she had left them, there was no sign of it now.
"Come on in," she said cheerfully." Dad's in the office, and we
have something to show you." She led the way.
"Seever was sitting at his desk, examining with interest an open
box about a foot square and half as deep. It was made of thin
wood, with the seams heavily caulked and a gasket on the rim
where the lid presumably was sealed. Clearly it was meant to be

watertight. It contained a quantity of obviously electrical
equipment—coils, batteries, and vacuum tubes —which told both
the newcomers what it must be though the details were far from
clear. Bob had of course taken several physics courses on his way
to the chemical engineering degree, and the Hunter had paid
some attention to both, reading and lectures, but neither had more
than the roughest idea how a metal-detector worked.
"That was a quick job!" Bob exclaimed. Seever answered.
"Not exactly. It was made long ago, well before your father
asked for it. Tavake's kids have been using it for months. The only
reason he didn't hand it over when Arthur asked for it yesterday
was that the young ones were out using it. Taro was surprised
when Jenny came around today asking for the same thing. He only
gave it to her when she explained it was the same project and
would get to the same people."
"The word's spreading like a tank leak on the lagoon," growled
Bob.
"Oh, no," insisted Jenny. "Mr. Tavake doesn't know what the
project is all about. I certainly didn't tell him, and I'm sure your
father didn't."
"He certainly knows that something involving several people
and his metal-detector is going on. In a place the size of Ell that
may not be quite the same as knowing what it is, but it's the same
as having every-one know that much—and the identities of the
people involved. Well, I suppose it can't be helped. But if we have
to ask for anything else, let's have just one person do the asking
from now on."
"Did you tell Maeta?" asked Jenny.
"No, of course not. But she has to know there's something
funny—"
"Well with that slip of yours about 'they must be here', she
probably won't ask me what I know, but she'll be asking me
whether I know anything. What do I tell her? You were being all
pure about lying yesterday, most of the time."
"Tell her the truth, of course," snapped Bob. "That you know,
but it isn't your secret." Bob was looking at Jenny as he spoke, and
the Hunter regretted not being able to see the doctor's expression.
It would have been nice to be able to guess his reaction to the
intimation that his daughter was not always truthful. His voice cut
in, but by the time Bob looked toward him he was well on his way
with another matter, and the expression was probably irrelevant to
the earlier question.
"Please let me know what you do tell her, Daughter. Maeta
works here sometimes, remember, and I don't want to make any

slips talking to her because of what she has or hasn't been told.
Personally I think she's a very bright young lady who could be a
big help to us, but I understand how Bob feels about letting the
word spread any farther."
"I knew it," sighed Bob. "Who else, while you're at it?"
"I wasn't making a serious plea about Maeta, Bob, but I did
mention Jenny's mother earlier."
"I thought I'd okayed that"
"You weren't really clear, and I didn't want to take a chance
until you were."
"Well, tell her. But let's keep it in the families for a while. Of
course, if I get so I can't run things, you're the boss and can do
what you think best. Now, how does this metal-detector work?"
"You turn it on here. If the earphones whistle, turn the knob
here until it just stops. Then if it comes close to metal, the whistle
starts again. If you don't get a whistle at any knob position, put in a
new battery. If that doesn't work, take it back to Taro. Nothing to
it."
Bob picked up the box. "It's much too light to sink.
How do we ballast it for underwater use?"
Seever pointed to a larger box made of concrete, on the floor
beside his desk. What looked like a lid lay next to it. Four eyebolts
projected from the sides of the cube, as did an insulated wire; it
looked as though the concrete had been poured around these.
Seever's explanation corrected one point; the "lid" was actually
the floor of the device. The wooden box was supported well above
this, and trapped air would keep any water which leaked in well
below the electrical equipment, at least to any reasonable depth,
as long as everything was kept upright.
"Taro says it's worked fine for his youngsters," Seever finished.
"He's had no trouble with leaks, and they've found a lot of stuff like
dropped tools on the bottom around the dock and the tanks. It
sounds off for a pair of pliers at five or six feet when it's really at it's
best.
"Now, Bob, tell me if I have everything straight. Jenny says you
are now quite sure that the Hunter's people have been on Earth,
and on Ell." Bob nodded emphatically.
"Right," he answered. "They found the generator shield,
apparently read its lettering carefully, which the Hunter says would
have let them identify his quarry's ship, and for some reason
neither of us has been able to guess so far they moved the shield
from Apu into the lagoon a mile or so, where Maeta found it. This
happened several years ago, but the Hunter is certain, they
wouldn't have left Earth, at least not for good. They may, he

admits, have spread out from the island either to look for him and
his quarry because they couldn't find them here, or to check up on
the people of Earth, or both. . He is certain they would come back
from time to time to check on the ship which they probably found,
or both of them which they may have found. All we have to do is
find at least one of them ourselves and leave a message with it."
"Two questions," Seever spoke slowly, choosing his words
carefully. "First, why would they have moved the shield? It seems
to me you're passing over that question very casually, and you
admit you haven't an answer. Second, why do you have to find the
ships, or one of them, to leave a message? I could see it as a
problem when your friends might have been anywhere on Earth,
but you now seem sure they're on Ell at least some of the time,
why not paint a message un-obtrusively under the dock?"
Bob sighed. "The second answer is the same as it always was.
We still have to avoid attracting human attention. A message with
any usable detail will be regular and complex enough to get not
just attention but real curiosity. Both the Hunter and I feel we can't
afford that. For the other point, granted it may be important but we
don't see how it can affect our plans. We'd love to figure out the
answer, or have someone ' else come up with a convincing one.
Until someone does, we'll have to wonder."
The doctor was silent for at least a minute. "I still don't like it,"
he said last. "I was hoping the Hunter might recognize it as some
sort of standard procedure with his police. Maybe it's not
important, but I don't like jigsaw puzzles with big gaps in them,
especially when there are no pieces lying around. However, we'll
have to live with the situation, I guess. You really can't think of a
reason, Hunter?"
"I can think of several," the alien relayed through Bob. "It isn't
just a matter of police procedure, which is not itself just a matter of
following rules. There are dozens or hundreds of situations in
which moving the shield would be the obvious thing to do. I was
going to do it myself if we had found it on Apu, in an attempt to
backtrack to the other ship. Clearly, whoever did it this time was
not backtracking.''
"Why not?" asked Jenny. "Do you really know the other ship
didn't land in the lagoon?"
"Of course not," the alien replied, but backtracking on the
comparatively open and smooth lagoon floor would be pointless;
from what I've seen, one could go anywhere with equal ease. I
was hoping, though not very strongly, that there would be only a
few lines of possible travel outside the reef. Anyway, Doctor, I
have little doubt that when we do find out why the thing was

moved we'll agree it was a good, sound reason, but I don't think I'll
be embarrassed for not guessing beforehand what it was. There
are just too many good possibilities."
Seever nodded acceptance of the point, and went on talking.
"All right. That leaves us with straight procedure-, problems.
We've made the diagnosis; we have to plan the operation. It
seems to consist of hanging this, gadget over the side of a boat in
all the reasonable places we can think of. These unfortunately
include the ocean to the west of the reef, which means we have to
keep the machine from getting tangled in bottom coral, and also
keep the boat off the reef itself. If you think the crash may have
occurred within the reef, I'm completely stumped on what you can
do. Bluntly, I very much dislike the idea of taking Jenny's boat
outside to windward, and the west side is windward most of the
time. You'll have to be careful. I won't forbid it, but I hope you'll use
common sense.
"Personally, I'd strongly advise getting a better boat—no
reflection on yours, Daughter, but I'd be much happier if you had
power available. Since I think it would be silly to trail the detector
overside blindly, you should wait for the diving gear that Arthur has
ordered; and I'd spend the interval finding a powered craft and
arranging to borrow it. You'll also have to try tying your work
schedule with those of the people helping you; remember, you
won't have as much free time as you like. You do start work
shortly, I assume?"
"I'd almost forgotten," Bob admitted. "You haven't come up with
any excuse, I take it."
"None that would hold up if you're going to be seen, diving
several hours a day. Of course, you could take Old Toke into the
secret and have him put you to work looking for spaceships."
"We've been through all that. No, thanks."
"Well, we've been through this too, but here it comes again. I
think we're going to need more people to get the job done. Your
father and I won't be able to help much, on simple time criteria.
Your mother may be free a little more of the day, but she has
Daphne to take care of at unpredictable times. I can let Jenny off,
of course, to suit the needs of the situation, but neither she nor
anyone else should be out there alone."
"She wouldn't be alone. I'll be there."
"And if one of your interesting medical problems rears its
head—especially if you're under water?"
"Well—" Bob fell silent.
"Remember, if I do the recruiting no one will doubt your sanity.
I'm willing to let them doubt mine."

"You shouldn't be. You're the only doctor on Ell, if they lose
confidence in you, you won't be here long."
"I can prove what I say."
"So could I," retorted Bob, "if anyone would pay attention. The
trouble is talking to someone who's walking off shaking his head."

"Have you ever had that happen?"
"No. I'm going by what I'd do myself. Be honest Doc. When I
first told you about the Hunter, what would you have done if you
hadn't considered it your medical duty to humor me?" It was
Seever's turn to be silent.
"All right," he said at last. "But there are people who would
normally humor me."
"Your wife, of course," admitted Bob. "But who else?"
"She'll do to start with. In addition, I'd take a chance on the
Teroa girl you've already set wondering about you. She's known to
be extremely competent in the water. I'll bet she could cover a
good deal of the area you want to search, even before the diving
equipment arrives."
The Hunter had already considered this point and added his
voice to the argument, but Bob was still under the pressure of over
seven years' conditioning, He had not been able to bring himself to
veto Seever's request to tell his wife, and had even managed to
tell Jenny himself, for reasons which were still not clear to him; but
that was as far as he wanted to go for the moment. He didn't
phrase it just that way, but both the doctor and the symbiont could
see the situation. They gave up for the time being, and the group
went back to the logistics problem of planning a way which would
give Bob a full day's work without his troubles' being spotted. This
seemed to be Seever's business.
"I still haven't found an argument which will get you entirely off
work and yet let you go diving, except the one you reject,' the
doctor said slowly. "I may, though, be able to come up with
something which will keep you away from heavy muscle work.
"There were enough peculiar results in your blood tests to write a
good monograph. There is something odd about your calcium. The
Hunter isn't doing a perfect job with your sugar. I don't think you'd
clot even a pinprick without him, and you don't seem to have any
adrenaline at all. He must be doing something or supplying
something that does an equivalent job or you'd be pretty dead, but
it isn't adrenaline. I can honestly report that your tests are peculiar,
but. . ."
Seever let his voice trail off.
"But PFI might react by sending me to Tahiti, or even to Japan
or the States, for more checkups and treatment."

"Can't you tell them just a little? That the tests seem funny and
you want to make sure, and I should be kept at desk work or
something so you can get at me whenever you want during the
day? If I'm not doing heavy work I might either avoid the fatigue or
be able to hide it, and I can cover up the joint pains well enough."
"That's all I can see our doing for now," Seever agreed. "I'll
write it up that way, and you report for work tomorrow and see
what happens. We may as well try it this way. I don't see what else
we can work on until the diving gear comes, since you won't let
Maeta in on the operation."
"I'm not quite sure about that." Jenny spoke up for the first time
since the medical questions had come up. Both men looked at her
inquiringly, and her father asked for clarification.
"You mean we can do something to get the equipment here
sooner? Or do you know of some here already?"
"Neither. I think I have an idea about getting something done
before the diving stuff arrives at all. I'm not really sure, and I want
to think it over. Bob, if you'll come here tomorrow after work—you'll
want to anyway, so Dad can see how you're doing—I think maybe
I can come up with something that will bypass the diving
equipment for a while. All right?"
"You're sure you don't want to tell us now?" asked Bob. "It
could save a day, you know."
"I'm sure I don't, because I'm not sure I'm right I don't want to
look silly." Bob looked at her father, who shrugged.
"I guess that adjourns the meeting," he said. "Bob, you go
home and get as many hours sleep as you possibly can. Hunter,
there's nothing I can tell you to do. Jenny, work your think box, and
if I can help any way without butting into your secret, tell me. One
other thing, Bob; drop by on your way to work in the morning and
pick up my report on you. I'll do my best, but don't expect too
much. Old Toke has always had the idea that recent graduates
should be impressed as quickly as possible with the fact that
they're not really indispensable, or even very important."
The meeting broke up. Bob went home without any attempt to
adjust his bicycle, and he was late getting the rest Seever had
recommended because Daphne was on hand.
After she went to bed he updated his parents on progress, but
omitted any mention of the bicycle incident. The Hunter spent the
night on biochemical work which might or might not have been
useful; Bob did not have the joint pains in the morning. Seever's
re-port apparently accomplished something, for the Hunter and his
host spent the day in the refinery watching dials and turning
valves. The work wasn't too hard. Bob's muscles held out to get

him back to the doctor's in the late afternoon.
And Jenny's idea was of the sort one kicks one's self for not
thinking of earlier.

8. Routine, Modified

It may not have been completely safe, but for the Hunter it was
quite comfortable. A foot-and-a-half length of three-inch pipe had
been secured with wire to one side of the concrete outer case of
the metal-detector. A wooden plug closed the upper end of the
pipe. The inner side of the plug held a small improvised electric
switch, which closed the circuit in a two-strand wire leading up
along the rope which supported everything. The Hunter could
send buzzer signals to those above, though they had no direct
communication with him so far.
The bottom of the pipe was open, allowing the alien to look
down with an eye composed of his own tissue. It was planned to
make an artificial one for him from a lens and a short cylinder of
opaque material, but this had not yet been completed. It would
have advantages; the Hunter's flesh was not completely
transparent, so that it did not make a particularly, and was not
completely opaque so that his "eye" did not exclude stray light
really well. He could see, but generally preferred other eyes to his
own.
The bottom was very irregular, and the coral growing from it
was even more so, so he had to keep sending "up" and "down"
signals to the people above. The most inconvenient part of the
setup was the fact that the phones of the detector were also up in
the boat, and there was no convenient way for Bob and Jenny to
let the Hunter know when the device responded. They had tried
tying a string to a washer held in the Hunter's tissue inside the
pipe, but there were so many spurious signals from the boat's own
motion that this had been given up. Bob had suggested a flashlight
bulb in the pipe, operated by a key in the boat through a separate
circuit, but this had not yet been built.
Over a week had passed since Jenny's suggestion had been
made. Between work and weather, very few hours had been spent
in actual search. The vague beginnings of a map of the sea's
bottom beyond the reef existed, but filled a very small fraction of
the master sheet which Arthur Kinnaird had made, from the
company map of the reef itself.
Checking the position of the boat every minute or two in order
to keep track of the area which had been covered was a major
nuisance, even though a brain-storming session in which all had

participated one evening had resulted in a fairly rapid fix technique
based on horizontal angles measured between corners of selected
pairs of the tanks in the lagoon. The Hunter would buzz a number
whenever he saw a fairly distinctive feature, and note its details
with a piece of pencil graphite on a sheet of paper lining the pipe;
at the sound of the buzz, those in the boat would measure and
record position. During the evenings of days when they managed
to work at all, the Hunter and Bob would correlate the sets of
records, and make the appropriate additions to the main chart.
There was a good deal of metal on the bottom; human beings
seemed to have a tendency to lose things overboard. So far, all
the specimens had been too small to give signals which could
possibly be from a spaceship, except for one which had been
found the first hour of operation. Checking it out had been long
and complicated; the word had not reached the Hunter until the
kayak had pulled into North Beach for rest and lunch. Afterward
the site had to be found again, and the Hunter lowered to the
bottom so that he could extend a pseudopod into the mud to
analyze the object. It had proved to be a well-rusted, extremely
large anchor. All the Hunter could do was buzz "no" to his crew.
When he gave them the details later, they guessed it had been lost
from a sailing ship at least a century before, possibly while trying
to hold off the reef during a storm.
Procedures were gradually improved as the days went on, but
the charted area increased with painful slowness. There was no
real danger, though the Hunter was constantly beset by very small
fish and arthropods. Biochemically his tissues were Earthlike
enough to be digestible by Earth organisms, and conversely; it
was something of a race every hour he was in the water to see
who ate more of whom. Because of the protection of the pipe, the
Hunter was able to keep ahead, but he realized how lucky he had
been to meet and occupy the shark so soon after his crash beside
the island.
For Bob, the days were not going very badly; fate seemed to be
holding its fire for the moment. He had not suffered the strange
fatigue for nearly two weeks, either because of or in spite of
Seever's and the Hunter's combined efforts there was no way to
tell. To forestall any complacency, the weariness had been re-
placed by the joint pains in more serious form, and, after a few
days, by muscle aches and cramps. The cramps were usually in
the legs and waist, and some-times he was finding it difficult to
conceal them from his fellow workers; they struck suddenly and
without warning. Malmstrom, whom he saw at times, made
occasional remarks about his old friend's deteriorated condition

but didn't seem to mean them too seriously
so far.
The PFI work had been a nuisance mostly because of the time
it demanded. Bob liked it well enough for it's own sake, and even
the Hunter was interested. Jenny had suggested that she take the
Hunter out during Bob's work hours, accompanied either by her
own father or Bob's, but the Hunter had firmly vetoed this. It was
bad enough, from the alien's viewpoint, to leave his host for a few
hours at a time even when they remained near each other and
could rejoin on a few minutes notice. If they were apart by the
three or four miles which separated the search area from the
refinery, he would not even know if he was needed for perhaps
hours.
About the fifth day of actual search—as Seever had predicted,
wind permitted their operation much less than half the time, and
they had met with no success in borrowing a powered craft—a
problem which no one had seriously considered developed, to
show that any separation at all of host and symbiont could lead
to trouble.
It was about half an hour before sunset. The Hunter had been
rather pitying the boring time his young friends must be having, in
contrast to his own, when the situation changed abruptly.
The Hunter was several seconds realizing what had happened.
The motions of the boat were always providing some vertical
acceleration, and no shock or blow accompanied the parting of the
rope. It just quietly let go, and the detector and the Hunter were on
their way to the bottom. There was a slight jolt as the wire took the
load. This, surprisingly, held, jerking the wooden plug out of the
top of the pipe and taking the switch and almost taking some of the
alien's tissue with it. By the time he had recovered from this
surprise, he and the detector were half buried in slimy mud.
Three and a half fathoms above, consternation reigned. Bob
had been holding the rope while Jenny held position with the
paddle, but she knew almost as soon as he did what had
happened. Small as the loss was, its disappearance had altered
the trim of the kayak, and the girl knew her craft very well indeed.
"Did you drop him? Have your muscles quit again?" she asked
anxiously.
"No. The rope seems to have broken or come un-tied. If I'd lost
my hold we'd still have him; I had it snubbed on a cleat."
"Take the paddle, and hold us here!" the girl snapped. He
turned to see that she was already strip-ping down to her bathing
suit.
"No! Wait!" he said. "Make sure we know what the position is,

first!" He snatched the sextant, made quick readings on the
reference tanks, and wrote them down. Then he started to remove
his own shirt, remarking as he did so, "We ought to have had
some sort of emergency buoy that we could throw over to mark the
spot when something like this happens."
"What are you doing? You can't go down!" snapped Jenny.
"You're not even as good a swimmer as I am when you're in good
health, let alone now."
"And I'm not as good a paddler, and if you do go down and find
the other end of the rope somewhere on the bottom, what are the
chances of my keeping the upper end in your reach?"
"Do your best. Give me the free end, pay out all the slack you
have, and take the paddle." Bob followed instructions, not because
he was convinced she was right, but because it seemed a poor
time to argue, and Jenny disappeared overboard.
The Hunter could see the canoe, and saw the girl enter the
water. Neither view was very encouraging. The kayak had already
drifted at least twenty yards from his position, and Jenny, while
apparently going as nearly straight down as she could, seemed
unlikely to get anywhere near him. Indeed, she did not even reach
the bottom; with a fathom still to go, her descent slowed and
stopped. She drifted for a moment, evidently trying to see, but her
natural buoyancy took over, and after a few seconds she began
assisting it.
Her head broke the surface a dozen feet from the kayak. Bob,
forgetting for the moment the importance of trying to hold position,
paddled over to her while she was getting her breath.
"Any luck?" he asked. She climbed back aboard before
answering.
"No. I couldn't quite get to the bottom. We should have goggles;
I couldn't see clearly enough to spot the -box and pipe, to say
nothing of the rope. The sun will be down soon, too. There isn't a
chance of finding him tonight. We'll go in, and you get in touch with
people and arrange enough time-swapping at the refinery so you
can spend all day tomorrow out here."
"I don't like to leave—"
"I don't either, but it's a case of what we can do, not what we
want to do."
"But the Hunter could leave the pipe and swim to the boat, if we
wait long enough."
"Fighting off all the small fish and animals he's been telling
about? He's too smart to try, I'd think. Could he find us in the
dark?"
"I don't suppose so. His eyes aren't too good." "Well, we'll

compromise. We'll stay as close to the spot as we can until sunset.
If he hasn't shown up by that time—and I still don't think he's dumb
enough to try because he'll know we can find the instrument more
easily than anything else—we'll go in, and you'll do what I told
you."
"All right. What will you do?"
"Go home and report to Dad, make a couple of marker buoys
as you were suggesting, and think."
She did not mention that she had already been thinking, and
fully intended to do something else.
The Hunter watched the boat hopefully until the light failed,
rather wondering why no one dived again and what was going on
up above. Jenny was quite right on one point; he did not consider
for a moment leaving the shelter of the pipe and trying to swim to
the kayak. He waited. When the light faded and he could no longer
see the surface, the boat, or anything else but a few luminous life
forms, he continued to wait. There seemed nothing else to do but
think, and he had to do that anyway.
Jenny and Bob left the kayak at North Beach, the point at the
end of Ell's longer arm, where the Hunter had come ashore and
found Bob nearly eight years before. Their bicycles were there,
since they had been using this as a staging area from the
beginning in order to save time, but there was no moon and no
easy way of keeping the machines on the road, so they were some
time getting even as far as Bob's house. He stayed there very
briefly, telling his mother that they were off the water but that he
had to get to a telephone, and went on to fulfill the assignment
which Jenny had given him.
The girl herself had not stopped. She went on to the Teroa
home and asked to see Maeta. The latter turned out to be at the
library. Jenny went there, found the other girl downstairs working
on new books—Bob's were not the only cratefuls to reach Ell each
June—asked her to come outside where they would not be
overheard, and told her the whole story.
Maeta had of course been wondering about the things Bob had
said in his unguarded moment, but this did not make Jenny's tale
any easier to believe.
Jenny was both insistent and persuasive, however, and the
older girl eventually agreed to go to the Seever house.
There, the report of the Hunter's loss produced such obviously
genuine concern on the part of the doctor, and his wife that
Maeta's skepticism weakened. Seever added verbal assurance of
the truth of the whole story, with details from the old detective
adventure which Jenny had not known. Finally, still with some

reservations, Maeta agreed to offer her aquatic skill to help in the
recovery of the equipment and, if he existed, of the Hunter. She
also agreed to furnish her own outrigger a more stable and
capacious craft than the kayak. Since she was not on duty at the
library the next day, there would not be the problem of sending a
substitute.
When Maeta had left, Seever looked quizzically at his daughter,
and asked, "What excuse are you going to make to Bob for this
piece of recruiting?"
"If he thinks excuses are needed, his brain really is getting soft.
If he doesn't like it, he can just stew. Are you suggesting that you
don't like it, either?"
"On the contrary," her father assured her. "It was the smartest
thing you could have done. I'm not sure I'd have had the—er—
force of personality needed to do it, that's all. Bob is not entirely
out of order, feeling the way he does."
Jenny refused to pursue the subject.
"Do we have any good, strong twine here, or will I have to go to
the store in the morning?" she asked. "I've got to make some
marker buoys."
The Hunter spent a night which would have been fascinating to
a marine biologist specializing in Crustacea. He did not come
dangerously close to being eaten, as the pipe provided more than
enough physical protection, but he himself had to do a certain
amount of eating, largely in self-defense. He observed interesting
details of structure and physiology in the creatures he digested. It
was the relatively coarse features, down to about optical
microscope limits, which proved most deserving of attention; at the
molecular level the things were essentially the same as Bob and
his father and, presumably, the rest of Earth's metazoan life.
A marine biologist might have been annoyed to see a boat
coming, but the Hunter was vastly relieved. Even when it was
close enough for him to see that it was not the same boat, he had
no doubt that it was coming for him. He was very concerned about
his host's condition. They now had been apart for nearly fifteen
hours. This would have been unimportant a few years ago, but it
might very well be crucial by now. He watched anxiously.
He could see the outrigger, and could see that the craft was
driven by three paddles. These slowed their motion as it
approached; one was withdrawn, and the; canoe came to a near
halt ten or twelve yards from -directly overhead. It held position
very well for a minute or so. Then something splashed into the
water. For a moment the Hunter thought it was a diver; then he
realized that it was a rock or a lump of coral. Presumably it was

serving as an anchor, though his improvised eye was not good
enough to see any line attached to it.
Then a second object splashed through the ripply surface. This
one was smaller still, and it took much longer for him to realize that
it was simply a buoy, in the form of a short, brightly painted stick
connected to another piece of rock by an even thinner cord. Before
he had fully worked this out, a third object had entered the water.
This one made much less splash than either of the others. The
Hunter was able to recognize a human figure, but not to identify it.
This time the diver displayed no difficulty in reaching the bottom,
and swam in widening circles for fully half a minute before
shooting to the surface for air. At one point, she was close enough
to the Hunter to let him see her clearly, and he was pleased to
recognize the Teroa girl. He remembered what had been said
about her skill in the water, and felt that he was as good as
rescued.
On her second dive he was not so sure. She stayed down
almost as long, and covered almost as large an area of sea
bottom, but she was obviously working away from his location.
Presumably she would come back sooner or later, but there
was no way of guessing which. There was also so way of guessing
Bob's condition, and the Hunter was once again coming as close
to panic as his species could.
He wondered how far the girl could see things clearly; he
himself could not tell whether she was wearing goggles, though it
seemed likely. He hoped so, since human eyes focused so poorly
under water. There was nothing he could do about her eyesight,
but could he improve the visibility of the tank, or the pipe, or the
rope? Failing that, could he do anything to shift the search pattern
in his direction?
The lump of coral anchoring the marker buoy was probably
movable, but was over ten yards away. Leaving the pipe and
traveling to it through the mud would be unpleasant and perhaps
risky, but that was irrelevant; the only question was whether he
could move the anchor when he got there.
He knew that with this idea formulated, he would' probably not
be able to come up with another until he had at least tried it. This
was a characteristic he had also noted in human beings. There
was nothing to do, therefore, but try it
He had covered three quarters of the distance when another
idea did strike him, but by then it seemed better to go on. He finally
reached the rock.
It turned out to be one of those annoying in-between things,
light enough so that he could lift it, heavy enough to make actual

transportation a major project. He spent some time at it, moved it a
foot or so, and finally decided that this would take too long. He
went back to his pipe and began to implement the second idea.
The hardest part of this was to get the trapped air out of the
concrete box, and hold onto it afterward. He could ooze through
the space between lid and boy easily enough, though it was
supposed to be watertight. Since the gasket had indeed held, the
pressure was lower inside, and forcing microscopic bubbles of air
against the gradient involved more work—in the literal sense in
which the physicist uses the word—than he had counted on. Also,
when the volume of gas he had collected began to grow large, he
could no longer keep both it and himself inside the pipe. Outside,
he had to devote some of his attention to the Hunter-eating
zooplankton.
At the same time, he was slowly drawing the broken rope
toward himself, until he had the end in reach.
He stopped taking air when the water, which he had had to
allow into the box to bring the pressure difference down to
something he could handle, came close to the electrical
equipment. Wetting this would probably cause even further delay,
and the bubble seemed big enough.
Maeta had stopped twice to rest during all this, but was now
working far enough away to cause the| Hunter to worry whether
even this idea would be good enough. There seemed nothing else
to do, however, so when she started down the next time, he
released his hold on pipe and box and let his air bubble carry him
and the rope upward.
The lifting power of the air proved sufficient for the whole length
of the rope, so he came to rest about half way to the surface. The
sun was not yet very high—the outrigger had arrived very shortly
after sunrise—but the waves were high enough to refract its
beams downward at regular and frequent intervals—probably
better, the Hunter felt, than uninterrupted light. He kept the walls of
his bubble as thin as tactical necessity permitted, and waited. He
also wondered whether Bob remembered the item about total
internal reflection which they had both read in an elementary
physics course.
The flashing reflection from the bubble naturally caught Maeta's
eye, though she was more than twenty yards away. She swam
over to investigate, since it hadn't been there before and was
certainly something unusual. The Hunter saw with satisfaction that
she was wearing goggles, and it was obvious that she saw the
rope, though what she made of him and his bubble he could not
guess. She followed the rope to the bottom, and saw and

recognized the equipment.
She returned to the surface for air, then came down again and
walked the marker buoy over to the site. While she took her next
rest, the Hunter released his air and settled to the bottom; and
before the new line was bent he was safely back in his pipe.

9. Joke Two

Rather to the Hunter's surprise, neither Jenny nor Maeta showed
any revulsion at the sight of his greenish jelly soaking into the
hand Bob dipped into the open top of the pipe. They watched only
briefly, not because of their own feelings but because the alien
could not stand the sun for long.
Maeta offered to stay with them for the day and continue the
regular search, but the Hunter wanted to stay with Bob long
enough to make a complete check for all the things which might
have gone wrong in his absence. This meant that a diver would
have to spend most of her time keeping the instrument out of the
coral, and this seemed impractical until the Cousteau equipment
arrived; and no one yet knew when that would be. Seever, the
third paddler, also had a point to make.
"You've been more in the water than out of it for the last hour
and more, Mae. I know you don't feel either cold or tired, but take
care of yourself. Get some rest before you go in again." The girl
laughed. "I could stay in all day. I have, sometimes," she pointed
out, looking back at the doctor without interrupting the rhythm of
her paddle. "I not only don't feel tired; I'm really not."
"Ordinarily I'd agree with you, young lady," Seever answered,
"but this time you've spent a lot of time under water. I know you've
trained for that, too, and are probably in better condition than
anyone else on Ell for such things—yes, I know all about your
reputation; who doesn't? Still, there are things no human body can
put up with indefinitely. You take care of that one."
Maeta laughed. "Aren't you going to tell me to put something on
to keep the sun off, over this bathing suit?"
"No. I'm a professional trying to do his job, not an old fogey
asking to look ridiculous. If my daughter or Bob were dressed as
you are, I'd have jumped on them already. I know as well as you
do that you don't

1

need it. Are you trying to get compliments out of

a middle-aged man? There must be better directions to shoot."
Maeta said nothing, nor did Jenny, but the latter looked at her
father as teen-agers have been looking at their parents for
generations. Bob paid no attention; he was listening to the
Hunter's generally favorable report on his own condition, and

promising himself that a very careful check of ropes, wires, and
other equipment would precede any future operations.
The rope which had failed had been examined closely by
everyone. Jenny had suggested openly that Malmstrom had done
something to it. Bob had countered with the suggestion that it was
the "pest" Andre desChenes. The rope itself failed to support
either contention; it had not been cut, quite certainly. There was no
obvious, reason why it had failed, and the rather futile argument
was still going on when they reached North Beach.
"When the Hunter finishes his checkup, I'd like very much to go
back out," Maeta said when the outrigger had bees pulled up. "I
like being on the water, and this is as good an excuse as anyone
could have— not that anyone needs an excuse. I wouldn't have to
do enough diving to bother you, Doctor, judging by the number of
times they've found large pieces of metal. There's room for me in
your kayak if you'd rather use that; I admit it's a lot lighter."
Jenny's feelings were mixed. The search itself was getting
boring, except when she remembered what it meant to Bob. Even
then it was beginning to be duty rather than pleasure. Also, she
was beginning, to change her mind, for reasons she couldn't have
given even to herself, about the wisdom of having Maeta in the
group.
Bob thought the idea was excellent, however, and the Hunter
also voted in favor of it; so the group headed for the kayak, with
Seever and Maeta carrying the concrete-and-pipe assembly. The
remains of the other coil of rope, which had failed the day before,
still lay on one of the duckboards in the kayak's bottom, and Jenny
picked this up and tossed it out on the sand. Then she gave an
exclamation. "Hey! Look at this!"
The others, gathering beside her, had no trouble seeing what
she meant. At the side of the duckboard, where it came closest to
the canvas but had been hidden by the rope, both the wood and
the canvas were deeply stained. Jenny touched the canvas, and
cried out again as the brown-tinted portion, nearly three inches
across, crumbled away.
Her father bent over and sniffed.
"Nothing I can tell now," he said, "but it looks like acid—battery
acid, for a guess."
"That punk Shorty!" snapped Jenny.
"Or Andre?" queried Bob.
"Why him?" asked the redhead. "He's asked me if he could
come out with us, and I said yes, in a few days."
"Maybe the few days got too many. I can't see Shorty doing
anything as serious as this; he's more the chalk-in-the-blackboard-

eraser type."
"I suppose the acid was poured on the rope, and the bit that got
on the canvas was accidental," Seever said slowly. "I can't see
why it was done at all, though I'm afraid I agree with Bob that it's
something Andre might do."
"It's certainly a serious question," Maeta agreed, "but there's
another. Are you going to let this hold up the real project? Isn’t it
still important to find those ships if we can? Or do you want to wait
until the diving equipment gets here, if it ever does?"
"Things will go so much faster with it that I'd al most just as
soon wait," Bob admitted. "We're spending an awful lot of time and
effort to cover an awful tiny patch of map. Maybe I'll last until the
breathing stuff gets here—"
"And maybe you won't," snapped Jenny. "Mae's right. We've
got to keep this going."
"We can use my rigger until your kayak is fixed," Maeta added.
"After that, too, if you want. The rest-of my family won't mind—and
I don't have to tell them what we're doing, Bob." The Hunter was
impressed; he hadn't known that the small girl had been so aware
of Bob's feelings. Had she been reading his host's expression that
well, or had Jenny told her? Maeta was continuing with her ideas.
"Look, I don't work at the library every day. Jen, you and I can do
some of the job while Bob is working at the refinery—"
Bob cut in with the Hunter's objection to being so far separated
from his host. Maeta waved it away.
"He won't have to be," she said. "We won't need the Hunter. I
can go down to check how far off the bottom the box is every few
minutes, and we can make position work easier by using a lot of
those marker buoys. We can make more of them easily. We'll fill
that map three or four times as fast as you're doing it now. Come
on, we'll start right now. I suppose you don't want to come, Doctor;
Bob's all right now, and you don't like to spend too much time
away from your office. But come along if you like, of course;
there's plenty of room in the rigger."
The Hunter, who had seen comparatively little of human
females during Bob's college career, was beginning to wonder
whether the tendency to take control of things was universal
among them, or merely half-universal among human beings. Many
of Bob's male friends at college had been pretty bossy, too, the
alien reflected.
"Thanks, I’ll go back to the office," Seever answered, "but you
take care of yourself out there, Mae. You're probably safe from
sunburn and coronary, but there are other things under the water,
and you'll be alone." Maeta's face lost its expression of rather

pixyish humor, and she looked Seever soberly in the eye.
"I know, Doctor.
Ill be careful—really."
She turned to the others. "Let's go."
The next day or two went well, except for Bob's condition; joint
and muscle pains were growing much worse, and neither Seever
nor the Hunter was able to do anything about them. The
neostigmine Seever had sent for seemed to palliate the weakness,
which had not been experienced for some time, and the nausea
attacks also seemed to have vanished. Both the human and
nonhuman experimenters would have liked to take credit for the
latter, but neither dared to; neither was sure it wouldn't come back.
The weather permitted the girls to work outside the reef, and a
very encouraging amount of area was added to the Hunter's map
from their reports.
The Hunter himself was shocked to find that he had mixed feelings
about this. He would have been happier to be on the spot himself.
Now he found that he was spending much of his host's sleeping
time wondering what they would do when the entire planned area
had been covered without success. Should they expand the area,
or go over the whole thing again? Which would give the better
chance? There had been little more than guesswork available to
establish the area in the first place, but it had seemed such
reasonable guesswork!
He sometimes asked these questions of Bob, but had little
profit from it. The young man was either in one of his philosophical
moods, and merely answered that they could face those difficulties
when and if they arose, or was irritated and would threaten to calm
them both with alcohol if the Hunter didn't stop bothering him. The
alien did not really believe the threat, but had learned to be uneasy
about human beings who had talked themselves too loudly into a
corner.
The real, major hitch in the general operation occurred five
days after the Hunter was fished from the bottom. It was not only a
Sunday but also a major holiday—the Fourth of July—-which
made some difference in the regular work pattern. The refinery
operated, of course, but Bob did not have to report until
midmorning. His father had left the house quite early, Daphne and
her mother went a little later to join most of Ell's holidaying
population on the beach and dock, and Bob had remained late in
bed. He got his own breakfast with little time to spare, and headed
down toward the road on his bicycle. His joints were a little less
bothersome than usual, but still made motion uncomfortable.
The Kinnaird house was slightly more than two hundred feet

from the main road. This end of the island was heavily overgrown
with the thorny byproducts of PFI's early efforts to breed fast-
growing material for the culture tanks. The driveway was not
perfectly straight, so it was impossible for Bob to see far ahead. It
was also, fortunately, impossible for him to ride very fast.
The machine was almost to the final turn, ten or fifteen yards
from the main road, when it stopped. Bob didn't. He "gave a
startled yell as he went over the handlebars, but that was all his
reflexes accomplished. The Hunter provided the usual tightening
up around joints to help in sprain defense. Neither response
proved really useful.
The driveway was not paved—it was really little more than a
path, though a jeep could negotiate it. On the other hand, it was far
from soft. It was met first by Bob's left hand, followed closely by
shoulder and head on the same side. Both forearm bones
snapped, the flesh on the left side of his cheek was badly torn, and
his left ear was almost removed. The Hunter had plenty to do, but
this did not include anesthesia; his host was thoroughly knocked
out.
At first the alien was not aware of anyone else in the
neighborhood, and could do his normal job with-out worrying about
the need for camouflage. He promptly blocked the opened
capillaries, and the larger vessels where bone had come through
the skin; practically no blood escaped. He was working the
displaced face and head tissue back to its approximately correct
place when he heard something.
At first he could not decide its nature; then it began to resemble
a fairly large body making its way through the underbrush.
Presently this ceased and very faint footsteps sounded on the
drive. The Hunter was relieved at first; getting Bob to the doctor's
place was obviously necessary, and obviously more than the
symbiont could manage unaided. Whoever was combing should
be able either to give help or go for it Bob's eyes were closed, so
his partner could see nothing even though they had come to rest
lying flat on his back.
The alien tried to force one lid open to see who was standing
over them, but had not succeeded when a thin sliver of metal went
through his host's chest, nailing him neatly to the ground. The
Hunter forgot all about seeing, and barely noticed the fleeing
footsteps. He was suddenly very busy.
The metal had entered Bob's body at the base of the
breastbone and slanted a trifle upward, going through the right
ventricle of his heart and emerging just to the right of his spine.
The heart continued to beat on its own, but the symbiont had to

surround it with his own tissue to prevent blood from escaping
through the two holes and filling the pericardium, which would
seriously hamper heart action. The metal helped plug the holes,
but was doing no good otherwise. For the moment, all the Hunter
could do was maintain blood pressure and circulation until help
showed up. There was no. immediate likelihood that it would.
Bob came back to consciousness in fifteen minutes or so. The
Hunter recognized the fact before his host started to move, and
told him slowly and carefully s what was wrong, to prevent his
doing so incautiously. Bob listened, and finally understood.
"What can we do?" he asked. "I know you can keep me alive,
but I'd hate to have the family find me this way."
"I agree, though probably not for the same reasons," the Hunter
answered, "The average human being who saw you might react by
pulling out this piece of metal, and that's something I want done
only under my guidance or Dr. Seever's. Do you think you're
strong enough yet? Don't worry about shock; I'll handle your blood
pressure."
"I guess so.” Bob reached carefully toward his chest, and felt
the projecting end of the weapon. "I'd say this was one of those
picnic skewers we cooked with the other night."
"That was my impression," responded the alien, "though I've
only felt the part inside you. Fortunately it's one of the straight
ones, not the twisted kind. I'd have missed more of your blood
otherwise, there'd have been a lot more damage to your heart, and
you'd be having a much tougher job of pulling. Get hold of it—
there—and work it very slowly upward. I'll take care of the inside.
That's good—that's right—very slowly, especially when the point
comes out of the ground—you don't want it to wiggle any more
than we can help—that's the way—"
The Hunter kept talking. Some time Bob was going to become
fully aware of what he was doing, but that moment should be
postponed if at all possible until the skewer was out of him, or at
least out of his heart. If nausea, a very likely result of full
realization, were to occur before then, the Hunter would have a
distinctly more complex job. He made it a point to hold his host's
eyes closed; for even though he was not permitting any blood to
emerge with the metal, the sight of the thing protruding from one's
own chest was something to be avoided. The Hunter could regard
the operation with professional interest; Bob was un-likely to
possess quite that much detachment.
It took several minutes, but they managed it with-out doing any
more damage. In spite of the fluid pressure and constant motion,
the Hunter had no trouble holding the heart punctures closed; he

judged they would heal in a few days, barring fallout from the other
problems, and told his host so. "But in the mean-time, don't do
anything which might raise your blood pressure too much," he
finished.
"Does that include standing up and walking?" Bob asked. "It
seems to me I should get to the doc without waiting for someone
to come home. Now that you're letting me look at things, I get the
impression that someone ought to set this arm. Thanks for taking
care of the sensation, by the way."
"Well, for once it wasn't your own carelessness," his companion
replied. "I'm not strong enough to set your bones. Let's see what
caused this fall, and then we'll walk, very slowly, to the doctor's."
The Hunter by this time had checked all his host's injuries. The
blow which had knocked him unconscious seemed to have
produced no real brain damage. His skull was intact, and while the
Hunter never dared intrude in actual brain tissue except within the
blood vessels of that organ, none of these seemed damaged and
there had been no leakage of blood into the cerebrospinal fluid.
Bob found movement no more painful than before, and made
his way to the bicycle. What had happened was fairly clear.
The front tire was cut to the rim; nothing else was visibly wrong.
Bob summarized.
"Someone stretched a wire across the road about hub high. After I
went into it, he removed the wire and skewered me, not
necessarily in that order. That's clear enough. But I don't see why;
it seems a little extreme for one of Andre's practical jokes—not the
trip-wire, but the stabbing, wouldn't you say?"
The Hunter had to agree, though he had thought of the same
child himself.
They could find no trace of where the wire had been attached,
though there was no lack of possible places. The Hunter wondered
whether any eleven year-old could have hidden his tracks so well,
but kept the thought to himself. He could reach no conclusions
except that someone was not very concerned with Bob's health—
there was no way of being sure that the offender even had
anything particular against the young engineer; he might have
been merely a target of opportunity. The alien had not practiced
his profession for several years, and began to wonder whether he
was losing the touch. He should, he felt, have been sure of
something.
Bob insisted, over his partner's objections, on wheeling the
bicycle back to its shed before heading toward the Seever home-
cum-hospital.
"If the folks come back before I do and find it in that shape,

they'll go crazy," he pointed out. "You can just keep my heart
plugged up a couple of minutes longer."
"It's not the time, but the pressure," the Hunter pointed out.
"Remember, I wasn't strong enough to pull the skewer out by
myself."
"I'll go slow," Bob promised, and with that his companion had to
be content.
Actually the principal difficulty with the walk was provided by Bob's
joints, which were still painful. They met no one on the way. It
seemed likely that everyone on the island—perhaps even the
setter of the trip wire, by this time—was out on the beach
celebrating. It would be the same ten days later on Bastille Day,
since French blood was as strong as American, on the island, and
those who felt more Polynesian than anything else were perfectly
willing to accept any excuse for a good time.
Unfortunately, there was no one at the Seevers' either, when
they got there. Bob used the telephone, first to -notify the refinery
of his accident and his whereabouts, then to call a few likely
places for the doctor. It seemed rather probable that he and his
family might be out on the reef, where people often partied or
picnicked, but the store and the library seemed worth trying.
Practically none of the island's private homes had telephones.
Before he made contact with anyone who could offer a useful
suggestion, the door opened and Jenny entered. Neither she nor
Bob actually asked, "What are you doing here?" but the question
was plain on both faces. Bob and the Hunter had expected her to
be out at the search area, and of course she had expected Bob to
be at work.
"Wind's too high, and onshore," she answered the unasked
question. "After all, we've had better luck with the weather than
we've had any right to expect, so far."
Bob explained his own presence by displaying his left arm. The
Hunter thought this would be poor judgment, but the girl had seen
such things before in her father's office and took it quite calmly.
She eyed the projecting bone for a moment and then said quite
steadily, "You'd better sit down or lie down. Dad will have to set
that; I suppose the Hunter has done everything else."
"I think so. Where is your father? I was phoning around for
him."
"Down on the beach with a bucket of burn ointment. Fireworks
day. Didn't you either remember or hear?"
"I didn't remember that aspect of it, and even with the Hunter
this arm takes up a lot of my attention. Can you bring him back
here, or should I go to him?"

"You stay put. I'll have him right back." The girl vanished again,
without wasting time asking how the injury had occurred. She was
back in ten minutes with her parents and Maeta, who had been
with them. It was much later, however, before the story was told.
The doctor and the Hunter had to decide whether to use a local
anesthetic, which would force the alien to withdraw from the arm,
or let the Hunter block the sensory, nerves from the area. The
latter would be better except that he was not sure he could handle
the general crepitating—the grating of the bones as they were set,
which would travel through much of the skeleton and be almost
impossible to prevent Bob from feeling. Seever pointed out that a
local injection would do little for this phenomenon either, and that it
would be better for the Hunter to be on hand to take care of
bleeding and infection. Seever would do his best not to let the
bones grate.
The Hunter agreed to this. Bob had to serve as communication
relay as his guest helped guide Seever's manipulation. Eventually,
however, he was able to tell the story while the doctor worked on a
cast for his arm.
Seever was quite indignant at not having been, told about the
heart damage before working on the arm, but had to admit that the
information would not have made him act at all differently.
Both girls thought of Andre immediately, and said so, but both
admitted there was doubt. The trip-wire they would have credited
to him without hesitation, but the stabbing was, as Bob had felt, a
different matter.
"You didn't even see the wire, much less the person, did you?"
asked Maeta.
"No," Bob answered. "All I actually saw was the cut tire, and the
skewer after it was out of my chest. The Hunter heard footsteps
while I was still out, but didn't see anything. At any rate it was no
accident. Someone wanted to kill me—or, as the Hunter points
out, wanted to kill someone. He may not have cared who."
"Maybe not,'? Pointed out the older girl, "but it was your
handlebars that were loosened back there at the library." Bob had
never discussed this matter with the others. He answered as he
had to the Hunter.
"They weren’t loosened. They were turned slightly
and tightened in a different position." He filled in the other details.
"That couldn't have been an accident either," Mrs. Seever said.
"Right. If my bar had been loose, then maybe; but it wouldn't
tighten in a different position on its own." "Then someone was
trying to hurt you even then." "I can't see that. It was a silly way
to try. Fifty to one I'd have been facing forward as I started and

never fallen at all. Someone might have been trying to annoy me."
"Was Andre" there?" asked Jenny. "No. A bunch of kids
collected to laugh, but he wasn't one of them."
"But you were inside the library, and your bike outside, for
hours," Jenny pointed out. "He could have been there any time."
"So could anyone on the island except Maeta, who was writing
things on file cards while I described books to her. I'm not worrying
about that trick; it's something I could believe of any kid. What
happened today is a different ballpark. A minor practical joke and a
neck-breaking effort combined with a stabbing just don't go
together."
"I'm not so sure," the doctor said slowly. "These have one thing
in common."
"What?" The Hunter's voice joined the others on their way in
from Bob's eardrum. ,
"In both cases, you faced the possibility of being injured or
killed, but because of the Hunter you're essentially undamaged."
Bob glanced at his arm and raised his eyebrows. "You know what I
mean. The Hunter has been doing his job. Whoever pushed the
skewer through you an hour or two ago is going to have a
fascinating body of information to use when he sees you walking
around later today. Couldn't both these tricks have been
experiments? I can think of one person who might very well want
to conduct some tests on you, Bob, now that you're back on Ell."
"Who?" asked the younger girl. The others were
silent. Seever’s meaning flashed on Bob and the Hunter at the
same moment, and neither was surprised at the doctor's next
question.
"Hunter, just how certain are you that the one you were chasing
was actually destroyed in that fire?"

10. Joke Three

"It never occurred to me to doubt it," Bob relayed from the Hunter.
"I'm sure I would have died under the same conditions. We saw
him on the ground. Bob poured oil on and around him, and lighted
it. 'The soil was packed hard, and contained enough moisture to
make penetration a slow job."
"You tried it yourself?"
"Not at that spot," the alien had to admit, "but—"
"But you still feel sure," Seever interrupted Bob's relay. "All
right, you may be—may have been— quite right. General
experience carries weight no one can reasonably ignore, though I
do wish you'd tested that soil on the spot and at the time. I also

think we'd better learn more about the desChenes boy who was
watching. It would be best if you could check him yourself, but
pretty awkward to arrange. I'll try, but if you can make any
suggestions—this sounds like our talk seven years ago, doesn't
it?"
Bob admitted that it did, and brought the discussion back to
order.
"I admit it would be worthwhile to find just what that young
clown has been up to, and whether your suspicion could have any
basis," he said. "We still have the search, though. What about
that? It's too rough today, you said, Jen?"
"Yes,” the girl amplified, "even with a couple more paddlers we
couldn't have held position long while Mae was down. It's going to
be bad for another couple of days, we think."
"Hm." Bob frowned. "And we have less than half the planned
area mapped. Well, I don't see what we can do—that's a pity; I
should think this arm would get me off work for a week or two, and
that would give us a lot of useful time. I wish those diving out-fits
would come."
"We'd still need a boat to get out there, unless you're thinking of
swimming a mile or so from North Beach, searching until you're
worn out, and then swimming back," Maeta pointed out
"You could do it."
"No doubt, but I wouldn't. I'm sane. Not for anything short of life
and death—I mean—" She fell silent, and a blush showed even on
her dark skin. Bob laughed, genuinely and without bitterness.
"All right, Mae, I know this isn't like rescuing a drowning child.
We all know the search is just a hope, and maybe not such a good
one as I want to believe, and it would be silly for you to take too
much risk. I feel bad enough about the chances you've already
been taking. There are sharks there sometimes, and they're not
always polite enough to show a fin as they approach. Tell me,
could a power boat hold position out there with this wind and
chop? If it could, we could send the Hunter down the way we did
before."
"It would be all right as long as the engine held out," the girl
said slowly. "I'd certainly be willing to take a minor chance like that,
for something this important we might be able to borrow the
Paukes' Vaevae, if they're not using it now. We'd have to go out by
the channel; she draws too much for the passage by North Beach.
I'll ask them if we can use her tomorrow, if you like. Are you sure
you won't have to work? You still have one good arm."
"How about it, Doc? What's PFI policy in this situation?"
"Pretty tolerant," replied Seever. "If it weren't for the Hunter,

you'd be in bed for a week, and certainly off work."
"If it weren't for the Hunter I'd be well on my way to being stiff
by now. But never mind, and pardon the interruption; I know what
you mean. Go on."
"Of course I can't report all your injuries, partly because they'd
be unbelievable and the Hunter has made them improvable. The
arm should be an excuse for a few days, though; I think you can
count on some search time."
"If the weather doesn't get any worse," amended Jenny.
It didn't, though it got no better for several days. The Paukes
were willing to lend their boat with the understanding that Maeta
would be in charge of it, and for several more days the search
went on.
By Wednesday the wind had dropped, and it was possible to
use Maeta's outrigger again; Jenny had not yet gotten around to
patching her kayak. On Thursday, Bob went back to regular
working hours. On Saturday, July tenth, the girls detected a
large mass of metal.
They were farther out now, and the water was deep enough to
restrict Maeta's bottom activities even when she wore a weighted
belt, so the operation had been slowing down. Morale, even for the
quietly determined | Teroa girl, had been deteriorating. Jenny
would probably have failed to come out several times if the
possibility of Maeta's discovering the spaceship in her absence
had not occurred to her.
They had another paddle, as Mrs. Seever had been helping for
most of the week, but the work was getting more exhausting for
the diver all the time. The detector could not be left unchecked for
more than a very few minutes at a time; the bottom was so
irregular that it was likely either to get tangled in coral or be so far
from the mud as to be ineffective.
Consequently, when the strong signal came and had been
carefully verified, they decided to stop and buoy the area and then,
though it was still early in the afternoon, bring the canoe back to
North Beach and get word to Bob and the Hunter. Jenny also
mentioned the chance to fix her own kayak at last.
Part way down the road, she discovered that the brake of her
bicycle was not working. It was a minor inconvenience, since the
road was fairly level, but it caused all of them to think.
The group broke up at the Seever home-hospital. Mrs. Seever
stayed there, Jenny went to the beach where her kayak was lying,
and Maeta went out the causeway to the refinery to report to Bob
and the Hunter. She found them easily enough, since no fuss was
made about adults' going anywhere on the island, and her

presence gave the two a strong suspicion why she was there; but
there were too many people around for her to report details. It was
nearly two hours before Bob could leave his station and walk back
to the shore with her and hear the full report. She gave it as soon
as they were more or less out of hearing from the group.
"There's a place about thirty-five feet long and ten wide where
the detector buzzes when it's within a foot of the bottom," she
started. "That's at the edges. It sounds off two or three feet up
when it's near the center of the area."
"That sounds good," the Hunter answered through Bob. "The
ship I was chasing was about twenty-five of your feet long and four
in diameter—much larger than my own."
"It could also be one of those midget Japanese subs from the
big war," Bob pointed out. "I never heard of their operating in this
area, though. Old Toke has always said that his own secrecy
measures back in the thirties, arranging for wrong 'corrections' to
maritime charts and that sort of thing, kept them from sending a
task force here to get the oil source. I'd doubt it myself. I know the
published charts don't show Ell but I'd be very surprised if the navy
of any major nation didn't know about the place. I just don't think
we were a big enough target early in World War II handy as we
were for our own folks. Anyway, even if a sub is a possibility, this
has to be checked out. Thanks a lot, Mae."
"There won't be time today," Maeta pointed out,

nodding toward

the low sun. "It'll be dark almost as soon as we could get out
there."
"That's all right. I'm off tomorrow anyway," Bob said happily. "We'll
let the Hunter down to feel it over and make sure, and then—well,
he can tell us what sort of sign or note to make and leave down
there for his people when they come back. Maybe he'll even be
able to tell us when they're likely to come."
"You're very sure of that, aren't you, Bob?" the girl said softly.
"Of course. We're sure they've been here, from what happened
to that generator shield you found."
"Couldn't the other one—the one the Hunter was chasing years
ago—have done that?"
"You mean if the doc's right and he wasn't killed after all? I
suppose so, but why should he?"
"Why should anyone else? The doctor asked that, and I don't
think you gave him much of an answer. I agree with him that it's a
very weak spot in your whole picture."
"Well, I agree with the Hunter. He knows his own people best,
and who am I to argue with him? I feel like celebrating."
"You mean you will feel like celebrating if what we've found

actually turns out to be one of the ships."
"Yes, of course. Right now, though, I just feel certain that it will
be—it must be—and it's a darned good feeling."
"I can believe it must be. I just hope I never hear you say, in a
belittling sort of tone, that wishful thinking is a feminine trait I wish I
could feel as sure as you seem to."
"The Hunter calls it a human trait. Why not be human, Mae?"
In spite of the slightly pejorative remark which had just been
attributed to him, the Hunter was sharing his host's feeling at the
moment. He, too, felt un-reasonably sure that the object the girls
had found would turn out to be one of the ships. He knew that
there was an excellent chance that it was something else shed by
Earth's metal-wasting culture, but fully expected, to be feeling
around inside a more or less damaged faster-than-light flyer in
another thirteen or fourteen hours.
As they reached the shore end of the causeway, Bob looked off
to his right along the beach. Jenny's kayak was lying bottom up
where it had been for several days, two or three hundred yards
from where he and Maeta stood, but the owner was nowhere in
sight. Many other craft were on the lagoon, though most were
heading for shore, dock, or anchorage as the sun sank.
"Maybe she's finished already," Maeta answered the unuttered
question. "She's had a couple of hours, and it was just a matter of
cementing a patch."
"Likely enough," Bob admitted. Maeta had not mentioned
Jenny's brake trouble, and it had not occurred to her that anything
else was likely to happen to the younger girl. Bob, so far, had
seemed to be the principal target, if anyone was really shooting.
Maeta, therefore, had forgotten about the brake, and failed to
mention it as they walked. The three of them had another few
hundred yards of calm as they strolled toward the Seever home.
It evaporated at the door, where Jenny's mother met them.
"I thought you weren't coming at all!" she exclaimed. "I suppose
you just got away from your work, Bob. Look, you're both to go to
Jenny's boat, Ben says, and look very carefully for something
sharp. We want to find out what it was."
Bob and Maeta started to ask the obvious questions together,
but the woman held up her hand to stem them.
"I'm sorry; I know that's out of order. I'm upset. Just as Jenny
got to her boat an hour or so ago—she stopped here for a while
first—she stepped on something in the sand that cut her right foot,
just behind the base of the big toe, all the way to the bone. Her
father is still sewing tendons together. A couple of young people
brought her home, but she's lost a lot of blood and hasn't been

able to tell us much. Ben and I want to know what she stepped on.
So do you. It isn't as| though this was the States, paved with
broken bottles; this is a civilized community."
"Will she be all right?" asked Bob, and "Did she lose too much
blood?" was Maeta's more specific inquiry.
"Yes to you, Bob, and I don't think so, Mae. You two get down
there and find out what she stepped on, please."
Neither of them argued. They headed straight toward the beach,
short-cutting the road but of course avoiding gardens. There were
large spots of blood along the faint path which they followed;
Jenny had evidently been helped home this way.
The beach was well peopled, though the sun was almost down.
Most of the boats were now ashore or at anchor. No one, however,
seemed aware of Jenny's accident; at least there was no crowd
around her canoe, and no excited clusters of people. It was a
perfectly ordinary Ell Saturday just before suppertime.
Bob and Maeta were adequately shod, so they did not hesitate
to approach the kayak. The sand a yard or so from its near side
was blood-caked, and this seemed a reasonable place to start
looking. With a brief, "On the job, Hunter, and skip the speeches,"
Bob knelt beside the brown patch and began scooping sand away
from it. The Hunter had to admit that his host was working with
reasonable caution, considering the circumstances, so he said
nothing and got on the job —ready to take care of things if Bob
found the thing they wanted the hard way.
After a minute or two, with the immediate site of the stain
excavated to a depth of six or eight inches Maeta began to dig as
well. After disposing of Bob's objections, which sounded very
much like those the Hunter used on Bob himself when he felt his
host was being careless, she started along the side of the boat
and searched for a couple of feet in either direction from the spot
on the boat which had obviously been prepared to take a patch.
Then she began working out toward Bob. Unfortunately they had
not come very close to meeting when the sun set.
"We'll have to try again in the morning," Bob said, straightening
up with an effort. "I wonder when we can get out to check the ship
or whatever you found?"
"Stay here," was Maeta's injunction. "I'll go home and get a
light, our place is closer than the doctor's."
"You think it's worth the trouble? No one else is likely to get hurt
before morning."
"Yes, it is," the girl said firmly. The Hunter, a little surprised at
Bob's obtuseness, added, "Of course it is, Bob. Remember your
bike trip-wire. We must either find what she stepped on, or make

certain that it's gone." Maeta had disappeared by the time this
sentence was completed, but Bob answered aloud anyway. "Oh,
of course. I hadn't thought of that. I guess I was expecting to be
the only victim, if there was anything to that idea. If this really
wasn't an accident—I suppose that's what Jenny's mother was
talking about—where do you suppose they'd hide it?"
"Close to the boat, where anyone working on the patch would
be most nicely to step on it," the Hunter answered rather
impatiently.
"Oh—then that's why Mae started digging where she did."
"I would assume so." The alien restrained himself with a slight
effort; after all, his host was not completely as he should be and in
any case had freely admitted that he was not always quick on the
uptake.
They tried to continue the search while waiting for Maeta, but
even with Venus helping the gibbous moon, progress was slow.
Fortunately the girl was back in a few minutes with a flashlight, and
to Bob's relief was willing to hold it while he did the digging. He
worked very carefully, with the girl's and the Hunter's vision
supplementing his own, and after another hour all three were
prepared to certify that there was nothing within a fifteen-foot
radius of the point under the patch site which could possibly
penetrate the human skin, except for a few shells. None of these
showed a trace of blood, even to the Hunter.
This was more than interesting, since skin had certainly been
penetrated.
"He'd have been smarter to leave it here. It could have been an
accident, then," Bob remarked.
"Like tightening up your bike again," Maeta pointed out. "Is this
really someone who's not very bright, which I could believe of
Andre, or is there some reason we haven't thought of for making it
obvious these aren't accidents?"
Bob had not thought of that possibility, and had no answer to
the suggestion. They returned thoughtfully to the Seevers' with
their report.
The doctor had finished his work, and Jenny was on a couch
with the damaged foot heavily bandaged and splinted to
immobilize toes and ankle. During the ensuing discussion, in which
the Hunter took little part, Bob and he heard for the first time of her
bicycle trouble. Everyone admitted that coincidence was being
stretched far beyond its yield point. Bob was the most reluctant, in
spite of the evidence, to believe that there was deliberate
interference with the project to save his life, but even he was
halfhearted in asking Seever whether other people on the island

had been showing a larger than normal incidence of burns, falls,
cuts, and other accidents. The answer was a qualified negative as
Seever put it; nothing of the sort had caught his attention.
"Of course, with a population this small—" Bob was starting,
when Jenny made one of her few interruptions of the evening.
"Swallow that with your degree, Bob. You know as well as I do
that these aren't accidents. They're just the sort of thing young
Andre has been doing for years, to his family and to me and
sometimes to other people. It's just that they're worse now; and
you've been added to the list. I admit I don't really know he's the
one, but I feel pretty sure, and tomorrow I'm going to know."
"You're not going anywhere tomorrow," her father said firmly.
"All right, then he'll come here. You tell his father he's due for a
shot, or something. I've put up with a lot from that kid even if this
isn't part of it, and I'm going to find out why."
"You've changed your mind about Shorty?" Bob asked.
"Not entirely, but he wouldn't do things like that to you, I don't
think. You get Andre here, Dad, and then leave him with me.
We've been through this before, and I thought we'd settled it a
year ago. I suppose Bob and Mae will be out beyond the reef
tomorrow, and you certainly won't let me go, but I'm going to get
something done."
"Even if it has no connection with the main job," Bob remarked.
"Even then, if it really hasn't. What else could have gotten him
interested in you?"
"I still don't see why you're so sure he's the one," Maeta said.
"I expect an art student would call it recognition of style," the
redhead answered. "Never mind. You just get that ship checked
out, and let me know the answer as soon as you can."
"How sure of that are you?" asked Bob.
"Not sure enough. Well report to each other. Dad, I'm sleepy
and this foot hurts. Anything you can do?"
Bob and Maeta took the hint. At the road outside they paused
for a moment, their homes lying in opposite directions.
"D'you think Jenny could be right about the desChenes kid?"
Bob asked "How well do you know him?"
"Pretty well. After all, you're almost the only one on the island
these days who doesn't know practically everybody. He certainly is
a pest; Jenny and Shorty are both right about that. He does seem
to get fun out of being a nuisance, and even out of hurting people.
I've never had much trouble from him myself, unless it was he who
hid my paddles a couple of times. He damaged some library books
about three years ago, soon after I started working there, and I
took away his card for a couple of months. The first paddle

incident came right after that. I found them easily enough both
times, and never bothered to find out who did it."
"I would have!"
"And thereby made the day for the one who'd done it," Maeta
retorted. The Hunter agreed with her, but kept the thought to
himself.
"Where does he live?" asked Bob. "I know what he looks like—
a little bit plump for his height."
"East of the dock road, close to the beach. Yes, he's a little on
the heavy side. He's not very active; I see him in the library a lot of
the time. He doesn't seem to get around with his own age group
much."
"Doesn't he like them, or don't they like him?"
"I've never thought about that. I'd guess it's his own choosing.
As I said, he's reading a lot of the time—at least, he usually has
several books at once out of the library, and pretty often is curled
up somewhere inside the place with a book. Jenny may be right,
but I'm not at all sure. Her father, remember, is blaming someone
else for what happened to you and her; he thinks you didn't
manage to kill that other creature the Hunter was after. I sort of
agree with him. Would your masculine pride be offended if I
walked home with you now?"
Bob felt uncomfortable at the suggestion, and might have
dismissed it too tersely for real politeness, but the Hunter
expressed himself sharply.
"Bob, even if you don't want to believe she could protect you
from anything, she would at least be a witness. Her presence
could prevent something from happening, or give us a better
chance of finding how it happened. Never mind what she calls
your masculine pride; use your human brains."
"All right, Mae." Bob spoke aloud. "The Hunter is on your side. I
was just going to suggest I take you home, since the accidents
seem to be spreading, but I suppose there's no evidence they're
interested in you. All right, let's go."
The walk was uneventful. There was very little talk; all three
were listening carefully for evidence of others on or near the road.
The moon, though high in the northeast, was of little help; this was
the jungle branch of the island, and the trees shadowed the road
itself as well as the underbrush on each side. Once past the
school there were no streetlights.
Bob pointed out to Maeta the scene of the bicycle trap, though
there was nothing useful to see in the shadows and even her
flashlight revealed little. He and the Hunter had checked the scene
over very carefully, in full daylight, the day after the incident, but

even the experienced detective had found nothing informative or
even suggestive. It bothered his pride. Maeta left them at the
Kinnaird's door, refusing the suggestion that she come in. Her last
remark was the recommendation that Bob's father come with them
the next day if he were free. As usual, Bob had to hold this item
until his sister was upstairs for the night. It then led to some
discussion, and was modified firmly by the lady of the house.
"Arthur has been having all the fun," she pointed out. "I love our
daughter, but I think it's my turn to get a day on the water with you
young folks, and let your father entertain Daphne tomorrow. All
right, Dear?"
The Hunter suspected that it was not entirely all right. As far as
he knew, Arthur Kinnaird had not had any "fun" on the project
either. However, no one was greatly surprised when the man
made no objection to his wife's idea.
He took the child off after breakfast, and the rest of the group
headed northwest along the road as soon as father and daughter
were out of sight. Bob's bicycle had not yet been repaired, but he
used his father's and they reached North Beach in a few minutes.
Maeta was waiting for them, and after a quick but careful
inspection of the canoe itself and the search equipment, they
shoved off.
The women paddled, while Bob undid the wires fastening the
pipe to the rest of the gear. The plug and telegraph had been
repaired, but he tested the latter again. Then he tied the new rope,
which had been supporting the concrete box, very securely around
the pipe, and placed one hand in the open end of the latter.
The Hunter left through the skin of the hand, the process as
usual taking several minutes, and signaled with the buzzer when it
was complete. Bob told the others. The alien could hear their
voices, but did not yet bother to make an eye.
"We're ready here," Bob said. "Are we close to your marker,
Mae?"
"Pretty near. We have, to hide Tank Four behind Seven, and
line the north corner of Eleven against the middle of Nine. It will be
a few minutes yet."
She had provided these bearings, the night before, and the
Hunter had mapped them. He knew without looking, therefore, that
they were about a mile north and a little west of North Beach, a
little less than that straight west of Apu, and about half a mile from
the nearest breakers.
Eventually the young woman called, "There it is. Be ready,
Bob." The Hunter felt his pipe being lifted. Then came, "All right,
we're right over it," and almost instantly warm water closed over

him and his protection.
He made an eye, but there was little to see until he reached the
bottom. The pipe was nearly horizontal, and turning slowly;
sometimes he could see the line from the buoy marking the
location, sometimes his eye was directed away from it. The boat
was not visible, as the Hunter had formed the eye a little way
inside the pipe to minimize stray light, and the open end of the
pipe itself was slanted slightly downward.
Bob had felt the tension go off the line when the Hunter
reached bottom, and had stopped paying out. However, the alien
found himself almost buried in the soft mud, and buzzed the signal
to pull up slightly. The spin had stopped, of course, but slowly
resumed as torsion in the rope tried to relieve itself, and he slowly
scanned the whole circumference.
The light was more than adequate, and he could see a long,
low hillock on the mud, corresponding roughly in size to Maeta's
description. There was less coral this far from the reef, but some
had grown on and over the ridge; the feature must have been
there for some years at least.
He was ten or twelve feet to one side of the nearest \part of the
elevation. He extended his eye briefly, to see which way the canoe
was pointing, buzzed directions, and in a minute or less was over
the ridge near its center. Then he gave the "down" signal, and in a
moment was on the bottom once more, not so deeply buried this
time.
Feeling at least as much tension as any of the others had been
showing, he extended a pseudopod into the slimy mud. It was at
least six inches thick even at the top of the hillock, but under that
six-inch layer was metal. He was tempted to leave the pipe
entirely, but very luckily did not. He kept groping with hair-fine
tendrils, adding detail to the picture he was developing. Yes, the
girls were right. It was his quarry's ship, the upper portion at least
nearly intact. He could feel and read symbols identifying service
connections, and presently found one of the small valves which his
own species used for entrance and exit. The larger ports, for cargo
and for the trained animals they sometimes used to manipulate
controls, would be in the lower part of the hull, which seemed to be
right-side up.
The access valve was shut. He felt around for the power control
and activated it, but was not very surprised when nothing
happened. It was much harder to operate the manual control, but
after several minutes he had the opening cracked enough to let
himself flow in. He thought once again of leaving the pipe entirely -
and entering the ship with his whole substance, but once again

decided to wait. It was not real foresight, at least not conscious
foresight, but it was lucky.
He buzzed a "yes" to those above, blaming himself for not
ending their suspense sooner, and reached farther into the hull
through the partly open valve.
He had time to realize what was happening to him, but not
enough to do anything about it.

11. First Aid

The three in the outrigger received and correctly interpreted the
Hunter's last signal, and for some time were far too excited and
exultant to pay any attention to events on the bottom. None of
them was ever sure just how much time passed before anyone
began to wonder why no more signals were coming through; and
even for Bob it took still longer for curiosity to become anxiety.
Eventually he gave a few jerks to the rope—the surface-to-
depth telegraph was still only a plan. Naturally, there was now no
response. He decided that his symbiont must have left the pipe
and was exploring the ship in detail. No plans had been made for
signaling or any other action in such a situation, and Bob spent
some time abusing himself verbally for the omission. The Hunter
agreed later that they had both been pretty stupid, but insisted on
taking his share of the blame, since he had after all been in a
much better position to foresee what actually happened. After all,
Seever had mentioned "normal police procedures."
Something like half an hour was spent waiting and occasionally
pulling on the rope before the three became really disturbed.
Maeta finally went overboard and swam down to see, if possible,
what was going on, but even diving goggles did not let her
examine the pipe in real detail. She was quite sure, when she
pulled it out of the mud, that the Hunter was inside, and to make
really certain she checked by touch.
For two reasons she failed to detect the tendrils the Hunter had
extended from his main mass; they had broken when she lifted the
pipe; and they were too fine anyway. The damage to the Hunter
when they broke was negligible; the memory patterns which
formed his identity were stored with multiple redundancy
throughout his tissue. Cutting him into two equal parts would have
been bad unless they could have rejoined almost at once, but the
few milligrams he had lost in the ship would not have bothered him
even if he had been conscious.
The ship had been booby-trapped with a half-living substance
designed to immobilize members of his species; but it had no

effect on the far coarser human cells, so Maeta herself was able to
return to the surface, get her breath, and report.
Bob, wasting no more time, hauled up the pipe. He had been
hoping that the trouble was merely electrical failure up to this,
point; but when he left his hand in contact with the jelly for several
minutes without becoming aware of the Hunter's presence by any
sort of word or signal; he knew that something much more serious
was wrong. They headed for shore at once, with Bob wondering
aloud why the Hunter had never given him a course in first aid for
symbionts.
They headed at top speed for the Seevers' home, giving no
thought to practical jokers. Fortunately their bicycles seemed
intact. Maeta carried the pipe, since Bob had only one really
usable arm and none of the bicycle carriers was adequate. The girl
found it quite awkward; she had to carry the pipe open end up,
after discovering that the Hunter's unconscious form—to use the
noun loosely—was slowly pouring out when she held it
horizontally.
None of them really expected that Seever could be of much
help, but no other line of action occurred to them.
They were rather disconcerted, upon entering the reception
room, to find Jenny seated beside her usual desk with the
damaged foot on a hassock in front of her. She was talking,
apparently quite amiably, to Andre desChenes, who did not react
at all at the sight of the newcomers. No one else was in the room.
Jenny saw the pipe, but did not realize at first that it was
occupied. Her first assumption, she admitted later, was that
something had gone wrong with the detector. Then she realized
that they would hardly have brought such a problem to her father,
and decided that something more serious had happened; but the
delay kept her from asking reflexively any hasty and injudicious
questions with the boy present. She came, she confessed, within a
split second of asking whether the ship they had found was an
instrument error.
"Is anyone with your father?" Maeta asked before any of them
could make a slip.
"No, he's in the next room, or if he isn't, call," replied Jenny.
The three went into the inner room, and met Seever just
entering by the other door. He looked at Maeta's burden and
frowned.
"Trouble?" Bob described the situation tersely, and Seever
looked closely into the pipe at its unresponsive occupant.
"You've touched him and nothing happened."
"I kept my hand on him all the way to shore and nothing

happened."
"Hmph." The doctor was out of his depth as far as direct
experience went, but he was a logical man. "I can't tell offhand
whether he’s unconscious, paralyzed, or dead. We'll assume one
of the first two, since the last doesn't give us anything to go on.
Assuming he's alive, the first thing is to keep him that way. We
know he needs oxygen. He may be getting enough through that
six or eight square inches, since he can't be using much at the
moment, but I'd say we'd better pour him into something which will
give him more exposed surface. What's his volume—a couple of
quarts? A pie plate won't be enough and I don't suppose
separating him among several would be a very good idea. He
must have some essential continuity to his structure, even if shape
doesn't mean anything to him. Here, maybe this will do." He had
found a large enamel basin, and they inverted the pipe over it.
After a few moments Bob suggested that the plug at the upper end
also be removed. Seever finally managed this while Maeta held up
the pipe itself.
The alien tissue was very viscous and flowed slowly. Seever
thought this might be a good sign, implying that whatever forces
permitted the being to control his shape must still be operating. He
was right, as it happened, but none of them could be sure. Bob's
mention of rigor mortis helped no one's morale.
Eventually the mass of green semi-fluid was in the basin,
spreading slowly toward the edges. "Bob, you're, the chemist,"
said Seever. "What else has he told you about his needs? I
assume they include water."
"Not the way we do. It's not inside his cells; they're: not really
cells in the way ours are, just complex single molecules. There is
water, but it's bonded to the surface for the most part and doesn't
form part of the inside architecture."
"Then there's no osmotic problem—it won't matter if we give
him fresh water or salt?"
"No. He can exist in both, as well as in our body fluids. You
probably needn't give him any, but I suppose it won't do any
damage and might be safer. I'd be more worried, though, about
food."
"Why?" asked Seever.
"That's really his smallest reserve. He can last for a while outside a
host body without—well, fuel—but the time is limited. He has
nothing corresponding to human fat or glycogen as a reserve.
When he was under water in the pipe he was always catching and
eating small organisms which were trying to eat him, he said."
"I see. I suppose any of his so-called cells can carry out digestion,

as they seem to do everything else. Well, then, all we can do is
sprinkle a little water on him, drop in a piece of cheese—protein
seems most likely to have everything he'd need chemically—and
hope. It's logical, but somehow it doesn't seem like medical
practice."
Whatever it seemed like to Seever, it was what they did. They
used only a small amount of water, so as not to shut tile patient off
too completely from air. This was unfortunate, since more water
would have absorbed the paralyzing agent more quickly. Its
distribution coefficient between water and the tissue of the
Hunter's species was very small—it had to be, to be as quick a
trap, as it was—but it was far from zero.
That left the group with nothing to do but sit and theorize. Most
were concerned about the Hunter himself. Bob's mother had
already started to wonder what the alien's prolonged separation
would do to her son, but did not at first mention this to the others.
Maeta suggested that they go back to the waiting room to see
what Jenny had learned from Andre, but the older people thought
this injudicious, since Andre might still be there, and Bob did not
want to leave his symbiont. His mother offered to stay with the
patient while Bob got something to eat, but while they were still
discussing the matter the door opened and Jenny crutched herself
in.
Her question about what had happened at the reef collided with
several about her progress with her young suspect, but Jenny,
won, and some minutes were spent by Maeta and Bob, telling the
story of the morning's events. Jenny took her first really good look
at the Hunter with great interest, and was with some difficulty
persuaded to take her attention from the hospital basin and report
on her interview. Her words were suggestive but inconclusive.
"I can't really prove anything," she admitted, "but I'm more
certain than before that he's done most of these things. He's
harder to get hold of than a jellyfish. He never actually, denied any
of the tricks, but he wouldn't admit them in so many words, either."
"Which ones did you ask him about?" asked Bob.
"The boat? The rope? My handlebars? Your foot?"
"Not all of them. I started with my foot, since I had the sample
available, and pointed out how I could have bled to death if there
hadn't been anyone around to help. He agreed that this was bad,
and remarked that if people were going to leave glass around the
island everyone would have to start wearing shoes the way they
do in Europe and the States. I didn't ask why he thought it was
glass instead of metal or a shell; I wanted to save his slips, if that
was one, to dump on him all at once later.

"I mentioned your broken arm, and he said you must have
gotten out of bike practice while you were away. How many people
did you tell how that happened, Bob?"
"I didn't tell anyone the whole story, except of course you folks
here, and Dad. I told the fellows at work that I'd had a fall."
"Did you mention it was off a bike?" she asked emphatically.
Bob thought silently for a moment.
"I don't think so. I wouldn't have wanted to sound as though I
couldn't ride, and I certainly didn't want to tell anyone about the
wire, especially when we couldn't find it."
"Well, Andre knows or is taking for granted that you were on
your bike when it happened. I didn't ask how he knew. When I
talked about the rope and the leak in my boat, he just asked what
we were doing out there all those days, and were we looking for
something special, and when was I going to keep my promise that
he could come out with us. When you came in with the pipe a
while ago, he asked whether that was what we were looking for. I
said it wasn't, and then realized I'd admitted we were looking for
something. I told you he was slippery."
"How about my handlebars and your brake? Is he a bike
expert?"
"I didn't get around to either of them. I'm still sure, from those
slips he made, that he's at the bottom of all this, though."
"Maybe he found out about my being on the bike from Silly. She
knows, and goodness knows how many of her small friends she
may have told," Bob remarked.
"And I still doubt that he's actually at the bottom, in any case,"
added the doctor. "I agree he's probably involved, though. I wish I
could figure out what happened to the Hunter today; I don't see
how the kid could possibly be involved in that. There weren't any
boats besides your own out there, were there?"
Bob and his mother said there weren't; Maeta qualified the
statement slightly.
"None stayed there. Two or three times fishermen or other
people who had come out the main channel
tacked down and called hello, and asked what we were doing, but
they always went right on."
"What did you tell them?"
"Just that we were collecting. That could have covered
anything—Pauhere's curios, or the Museum Exchange, or just
amusing ourselves."
"Do you remember who they were?" asked Seever.
"Most of them, I think. Is it important?"
"I wish I could guess. I wonder if anyone on Ell could have free-

diving equipment that the whole world doesn't know about."
"If they have," Maeta assured him, "it's a pretty close secret. As
you say, usually everyone knows something like that. I see what
you're driving at now, but I don't see any way to be really sure—
except that I'd swear no boat stayed close enough for long enough
to let a diver get over near us and get back again if he was
swimming. Maybe if someone's invented a personal outboard
motor for divers it could have been done, but they'd have been
taking a chance that I'd be down at any moment and see them."
"Maybe it wouldn't be they taking the chance," Seever pointed
out grimly. "Well, we're speculating again. Make a list of the people
you saw go by, first chance you get, and let me have it. When you
don't know what you're doing, record data, I always say. I know the
more pieces there are, the tougher the puzzle; but if the pieces
belong, you have to have them. Any other plans, Bob?"
"I don't see what we can do about the Hunter except wait," was
the answer. "If you should think of anything better, Doc, go ahead
without waiting for my opinion."
"I don't agree with that," said Maeta. "Bob has lived with the
Hunter for years, and must know more about him than anyone—
even Bob himself—realizes. Some idea of the doctor's might recall
something to him that he hasn't thought of yet—or might remind
him of something which would warn us that the idea was bad, or
dangerous to the Hunter."
"A good point," agreed Seever. "But how about the rest of the
job? You're interpreting that 'yes' on the buzzer as meaning the
ship was really there. Does that give us any line of action, even
without the Hunter?"
Neither Bob nor Jenny had any ideas at first, but Maeta
produced one almost instantly.
"As I understand it," she said," the plan was for the Hunter to
leave a message at this ship, on the assumption that his people
are on the earth and would check there at times. Hadn't we better
put a note there ourselves? We don't know whether he had a
chance to before he was knocked out."
"We don't know the language," pointed out Jenny.
"Why should we need to? If they're really investigating this
world, there's a good chance they'll have learned French or
English."
"That's a thought," Bob agreed. "We could write out the whole
story and put it in a weighted bottle, right on top of the ship. They
couldn't help noticing it"
"It may not be quite that easy," Maeta pointed out. "The ship is
buried under, the mud, and the bottle might not be obvious. They

might not pay attention to anything not buried like the ship. The
Hunter could probably, have put his message inside the ship, but
we might not even able to put it exactly on top. Remember, the
Hunter had us move around a little before he finally signaled he'd
found it—if that was what his signal meant."
"What else could he have meant?" asked Bob in indignantly.
"And can't we remember which way he moved us?"
"Nothing else, I hope; that's all that makes sense to me, too. A
One-word message can usually be misinterpreted, though. Yes,
we can find the spot again. I just don't want you to think all the
troubles are over." "No fear of that," Bob assured her. "I never
have the chance to get that idea."
"Sorry, still hurting?"
"Yes. Muscles, joints, arm, and face, though the last is pretty
well back together. Well, I'll try to get my mind off it by writing a
message to the Hunter's crowd. The sooner we get it out there, the
better. If they do visit the ship it must be at night, and with the luck
I have these days it'll be tonight if we don't get out there this
afternoon. I wonder how often they do check back? Or if anything
the Hunter did today could have set off a signal to bring them
back?"
"That's a thought," agreed Seever. "Much better than your last
one. Why would they have to come by night? They could make
their approach under water at any time—or can their spaceships
only move straight up and down, or something like that?" Bob
looked startled.
"I never thought of that, and I don't really know about the ships.
Well, we should get the message out there anyway. Somebody
find a bottle."
The note was written as briefly as possible, in pencil, on a single
sheet of paper. The doctor then waxed the paper. A bottle had
been found, the amount of sand needed to sink it ascertained, and
paper and, sand inserted. A tiny hole was drilled in the cork of the
bottle to facilitate the entry of one of the Hunter's people, and the
cork was tightly inserted; then the bottle was shaken around, top
downward, until the paper had worked its way above the sand,
presumably out of reach of water which would be forced part way
into the bottle by the pressure at the bottom.
"That seems to do it," Jenny said happily when all this was
accomplished. "I wish I could go with you."
"But of course you're too intelligent to suggest it seriously," her
father added. Jenny made no answer.
"Sorry, Jen," Bob put in, "but there really isn't much to this
anyway. By the time there's anything more to do, if there ever is,

you should be all right again. There's just one more thing we need,
then we can take off."
"What's that?" asked Seever.
"A good, heavy rock."
"What for? The bottle will sink."
"I know the bottle will. The trouble is, I won’t. We're not just
dropping the bottle over the side; we're putting it right on the ship.
I'm not a good enough swimmer to reach the bottom at four
fathoms, at least with one bad arm, and if I got there I wouldn't
have air enough to go looking for just the right spot. I'll sink myself
with the rock, and save effort and air."
"And the doctor was talking about Jenny's intelligence!"
exclaimed Maeta. "He'll have to hunt for some different words for
yours. I'll go down, you idiot. Why this urge to go swimming with a
broken arm? If you just want to see the ship, don't bother; you
can't. It's all under mud."
"I know you can do it," admitted Bob. "You can do it better than
I could even with two good arms and all my health. But there's
something down there that injured the Hunter, and I have no
business asking anyone else to face that. You've already been
taking enough chances under water for me, Mae. This is my job
and the Hunter's. He's taken a chance and apparently lost; now it's
my turn."
His mother started to say something, but changed her mind.
"That's right, Mom. Of course you don't want me to go down,
but you're honest enough to know I'm the one who should."
Maeta was on her feet. She was not really qualified to tower
over anyone, but Bob was seated and had to lookup.
"Skip the heroics, Robert Kinnaird" she snapped. "The person
who should go is the person who can do it best, and don't make it
sound like a Roger Young mission, I'll be down and up again, with
the bottle exactly where it should be, in ninety seconds—and that's
allowing for mistakes in spotting the canoe. If anyone sees a
shark, I'll wait; I'm not being heroic. I was down there before, after
the Hunter was knocked out, remember, and nothing happened to
me. And how many rocks do you plan to take out there in my
canoe? You'll miss the site the first time and have to come up, and
you'll need another rock to go down again, and another and
probably another."
"Don't rub it in."
The battle of wills was fun to watch. Told about it later, the
Hunter regretted having missed it, though, as he admitted, the end
was never in doubt. Fond as he was of Bob, he knew by now that
he was not always a completely reasonable being. He had not

known Maeta nearly as long—casual acquaintance as one of
Charles Teroa's sisters seven years before hardly counted—but
he already knew that she was more intelligent than his host and
quicker-witted. She also possessed a more forceful personality.
Besides all this, in the present situation she was right and both
of them knew it. Bob's mother and the doctor kept out of it after the
first few words, and between them managed to keep Jenny quiet
too. The redhead, for reasons of her own, was on Maeta's side,
but the older girl needed no help.
No rocks were carried.
Seever suddenly decided that he owed himself a pleasant ride
on the water, and went along. Bob objected to this, saying that the
Hunter should be kept under a medical eye, but the doctor insisted
that there was nothing more he could do for the alien. In fact, he
was much more worried about Bob, who now was deprived of his
alien partner, lacked infection resistance of his own, and was
otherwise not at his best. He refrained from mentioning this reason
to either Mrs. Kinnaird or her son, and decided not to remind them
of the situation by taking his bag along. He regretted this omission
later.
It was mid-afternoon when they reached the out rigger on North
Beach and embarked. The swell had increased since morning, and
everyone was wet by the time they were afloat. The mile to the site
was covered quickly, with all but Bob at the paddles, and the final
search for the buoy took a little longer than Maeta had predicted.
She worked the craft into what she recalled was the right position
with respect to the marker, told Seever and Mrs. Kinnaird to hold it
there, and without further ceremony slid overboard with the bottle.
For a moment she trod water between the canoe's hull and the
outrigger as she took in air; then she upended and drove
downward.
Seever and Mrs. Kinnaird watched her as well as they could
without interfering with their paddling. Bob did not. He was barely
aware that she had gone at all he was becoming less and less
conscious of any thing except pain. His limbs were sorer than
ever, and his head felt hot. He knew the Hunter had been away
from him for longer periods than this, but he felt far worse than the
last time; and he was beginning to wonder whether the juggling act
with his hormones was closing. He didn't know. He was beginning
not to care. The sun hurt his eyes, even in the shadow of his hat
brim, and he dosed them.
Maeta surfaced, well within the ninety seconds she had
allowed, and slid into the canoe as smoothly as she had left it. "No
trouble," she said, after getting her breath. "You can see the

outline of the ship under the mud, if you know what to look for. I
felt into the stuff. It's very soft, and there are only a few inches of it
over the top part of the ship. I felt the hard stuff, but couldn't tell by
touch if it was metal or something else."
"You left the message." Bob's mother did not put it as a
question.
"Sure. Neck of the bottle down against the hull, the bottom part
with the paper sticking above the mud. If they look at all, or feel at
all carefully, they can't miss it."
"You shouldn't have taken the chance of touching the ship," the
older woman said. "Bob was right about that. You might have
gotten an electric shock, or something of that sort, as the Hunter
seems to have done. Could that be what happened to him, Ben?"
The doctor shrugged. "No way to tell, until he comes to and
tells us. I don't know what electricity would do to him; I couldn't
guess even if his tissues were like ours. There's no simple way to
tell; a man can stand a shock that will kill a horse. Did he ever tell
you anything about that, Bob?"
An incoherent mumble was his only answer. Mrs., Kinnaird
gave a gasp of terror, but managed to retain her grip on her
paddle.
Seconds later Bob was stretched out on the bottom of the
dugout while Seever checked him over as well as the cramped
situation allowed. He could find only the deep flush on the face
and a racing pulse, which might have meant several things. The
women were already paddling back toward North Beach as hard
as they could. After doing what little he could for Bob, the doctor
picked up the remaining paddle and used it.
At the beach, he issued orders quickly.
"We can't hand-carry him all the way to the hospital. Annette,
get to your house and see if Arthur is there. If he is, have him get a
car—he can usually find one. Maeta, bike down to the village and
try to find either him or a car, too. Check around the desalting
stations first, then go out to the refinery. Never mind explanations,
just say I need a car, capital NOW. As you pass my place, tell Ev
to get my kit here as fast as she can. I should have known better
than to come without it."
With the women gone, Seever turned back to his patient. They had
carried him into the shade, and it was now obvious even without a
thermometer that he had a high fever. His face was flushed, and
he was perspiring heavily. Seever was somewhat relieved by the
latter fact, but be removed his own shirt and Bob's, soaked them in
the sea, and spread one over the younger man's chest He
improvised a turban with the other.

It was almost sunset when a jeep appeared at high speed.
Arthur Kinnaird was at the wheel, his daughter beside him, and
Maeta in the back seat. They stopped a few yards short of where
Bob was lying; Kinnaird was not the sort to take chances on being
stuck in the sand at such a time.
"Your wife wasn't home. I've told him everything," Maeta said
before Seever could ask a question.
"All right. Arthur, get us to my place as quickly as you can. I'll
use the back seat, with Bob. Daph, crowd in front with Mae until
we get to your house; you can get off there."
"No! I'm staying with you. Bob's sick!"
Seever was too busy even to shrug, much less argue. Maeta
had shifted to the front seat and taken the child on her lap, and
seconds later they were speeding back down the road. Bob's
father said nothing as they approached his house, and did not
slow down; the child was still with them as they approached the
hospital. She tried to help carry Bob into the building; then Maeta
took her out. Arthur Kinnaird remained as Seever went to work.
The trouble was plain enough now. Bob's temperature was
indeed high, and the broken left arm was showing the red streaks
which indicated massive in fection. Seever removed the cast to
reveal a red and black mess underneath.
"Antibiotics?" asked Kinnaird.
"Maybe. They don't work on everything, in spite of people's
calling them 'miracle drugs'—they were doing that with the sulfa
compounds a few years ago, too. I'll do the best I can, but he may
not be able to keep the arm."
"This is a fine time for the Hunter to be out of action."
"Probably not coincidence," pointed out Seever. "If he were
there, this wouldn't have happened at all. Look, I'll give the boy a
shot of what seems best— I'll make some tests first—and then, if I
can, I'll wait six hours before doing anything else. Of course, if
things get obviously worse I won't be able to give all that time.
Then well have to decide about the arm.
"And I'm going to do one more thing."
Kinnaird nodded in understanding as the doctor put a smaller
table beside the one on which Bob was lying, placed the basin
containing the Hunter on it, and put Bob's right hand in the basin.
They watched as the hand sank slowly into the jelly. Then Seever
got out his microscope, and took scrapings from the tissue of the
other arm.

12. Joker

That was the situation when the Hunter woke up. It took him a little
while to catch up with reality, though he knew well enough what
had happened at the ship. It had obviously been found by the
search expedition, identified, as being the one stolen by the
Hunter's quarry, and booby-trapped against the possible return of
that individual. The alien recalled Seever's question about
standard police procedures, and would have blushed had he been
equipped for it.
He was perfectly familiar with the immobilizing agent which
had been used, and if he had been properly alert would never
have been trapped by it.
He became aware of the basin which held him, and of his host's
hand immersed in his substance. That was presumably what had
allowed him to wake up. The agent itself would have held him for
months; but he had absorbed an equilibrium amount of it while
separate from his host's body; and his own four pounds of tissue
would have been saturated by a very small total quantity of the
substance. Since it was designed to be absorbed rapidly by
tissues similar to those of the Hunter's usual host species, which
were biochemically fairly similar to those of humanity, and since
Bob massed thirty-five or forty times as much as his symbiont,
enough had now diffused into Bob's body to clear the Hunter's
nearly completely. Returning to Bob seemed safe enough, since
the concentration of the substance would be so much smaller.
Without bothering to check on his surroundings by forming an
eye, the Hunter began to soak his way into the hand and spread
through his host's body in normal fashion. He had completed
about a quarter of the job when he heard Arthur Kinnaird's voice.
"Ben, Look! The level is going down in the Hunter's dish, and
he's higher around Bob's wrist than before! He must be awake!"
The alien extended a finger-sized pseudopod from the basin
and waved it to let the speaker know he had been heard. The
doctor's voice promptly responded.
"Hunter, get in there and get to work! Bob has picked up a very
bad infection that my drugs don't seem to be touching, and he
needs you. We'll ask you what happened later; first things first."
The Hunter waved again in acknowledgment. He was already
aware of the trouble, and was working on it.
It was real work. Destroying the infecting organisms was a
minor task, finished in minutes; but the toxins they had produced
were far more difficult to neutral ize, and much of the tissue in the
arm where they had entered was totally destroyed. The fracture
had not been responsible; neither the Hunter nor Seever had
made any professional errors there. A tiny wooden splinter had

gotten into Bob's left hand just beyond the end of the cast. It had
clearly entered after the Hunter's departure; Bob himself might not
have noticed it, but the alien could not possibly have failed to. With
his personal resistance to infection long since destroyed and his
symbiont absent, Bob was a walking culture tube; a few hours had
nearly destroyed his arm. The Hunter had not realized that his
host's general self-reparability had become so poor, but the facts
seemed beyond dispute. It was not the first time he wished he had
studied biochemistry more thoroughly on his home world. He
trusted contact with the check team could be made soon; they
would certainly have specialists in tins field among their numbers.
But he had to get back to work. He could clean up the ruined
arm and expect it to be replaced, however slowly, by normal
healing. The real worry was Bob's brain. Some of the bacteria as
well as their toxins must have been carried to that organ by his
circulatory sys tem, and it could not be taken for granted that
nothing had left the blood vessels to lodge in nerve tissue.
The Hunter had always been afraid to intrude into this material
himself, though he had maintained a network of his own tissue in
the capillaries. Brain cells were the objects where he was most
afraid of making a mistake based on differences between human
biochemistry and what he was more used to. Now it was
necessary to take the chance, and he took it; but he worked very,
very slowly and very, very carefully.
The situation was one he had never been able to explain at all
clearly either to his host or to Seever who had been curious about
it. The Hunter did possess the ability to sense directly structures
down to the large-molecule level. At the same time he could be
aware simultaneously of the trillions of cells in a living organism,
and work on them all at once with the same attention to each that
a jeweler could give to a single watch. When he tried to describe
this to a human being, however, it seemed to involve a contrast for
his listener; the human seemed to think of him as a whole race of
beings instead of an individual. This tended to bother the Hunter,
because be could only think of himself as an individual.
Sometimes, facing problems which seemed beyond his ability,
he wished there were more of him.
He did solve this one, for the time being. Relatively few bacteria
had actually reached Bob's brain cells, and the alien managed to
destroy these with comparatively little damage to nearby cells. He
knew that these would not be repaired or replaced; it was the
same with every humanoid species he knew, and was assumed by
the scientists of his own kind to be an evolutionary byproduct of
overspecialization of the brain cell. However, the brain itself was a

highly redundant structure, and even though Bob was losing
thousands of its cells every day, it would be many years before the
cumulative effect became serious.
And at the moment, there was little point in worrying years
ahead.
Bob was conscious and, except for the arm, normal by Monday
night. He was still in the hospital section of the Seevers' home—
Mrs. Seever remarked that with two patients, the, place was more
like a hospital than it had been, for years—and after dinner the en-
tire group assembled to bring everything up to date. Even Bob's
parents were present; Daphne was spending the night with a
friend.
The Hunter explained in detail what had happened to him,
stressing the obvious fact that his people must be somewhere
around, and mentioning as little as possible the lack of alertness
which had led to such unfortunate results. The others told him of
the message left at the ship, and its details, of which he approved.
He agreed with the doctor that his entry into the ship had probably
tripped a signal at the same time that it had released the
paralyzing agent, so the check team was no doubt aware that the
ship had been visited. What they would think when they found the
small valve open but no prisoner on hand could only be guessed.
Of course, if they found the message all would be well, but the
Hunter agreed with Bob's pessimistic view that they had probably
responded to the signal before the bottle had been placed. It would
have been less surprising if they had arrived before the pipe
containing his helpless form had been pulled up.
"They would be able to get to any place on Earth in an hour or
so, and wouldn’t have to wait until night to check the ship," the
Hunter assured in his human friends.
"Then we'd better get back to it as soon as we can," Maeta
responded. "We'll try, or the Hunter will try, to tell whether the
bottle message has been found and read; but more important, will
leave a much more complete message in the Hunter's own
language, with instructions on just where to meet him and how to
recognize Bob. You didn't cover that in your note, did you, Bob?"
"No, I didn't think of it. I was more concerned with getting the
history down. If they've read it, at least they'll know the other
creature is dead, and, there's no more need for booby traps."
"They'll have heard, if they read it, that the other one is dead.
Will they believe it?" asked Seever.
"That's why the Hunter will have to supplement that message,"
Maeta pointed out. "He should be able to identify himself clearly in
some way—a serial num ber, or something like that."

"But I put my name on my note," Bob said. "They should be
able to find me."
"Why?" asked the dark-haired girl. "We can't take for granted
that they know all about Ell and its people."
"Why not? They must have investigated the island pretty well
when they first came. They'd probably have found us then only I
expect the Hunter and I weren't here."
"But why would they have known the people by name?" Maeta
countered. "I suppose they'd have used human hosts the way the
Hunter did, but they wouldn't have gotten in touch with them,
would they? Talked to them, and used their help the way the
Hunter used yours?"
"Definitely not," the detective said. "Unless some very special
situation like mine demanded it, that would be extremely contrary
to policy. I did it be-cause I didn't at the time think there was the
slightest chance of help from home, and my quarry was a danger
to your people."
"Right," Maeta nodded. "And whoever is here, they haven't
been hanging around Ell all these years just getting to know these
particular people. For one thing, if they had, wouldn't we have
more people on the island in Bob's condition? Hunter addicts, if
you don't mind?"
"Very unlikely," the alien replied. The group would have
specialists able to forestall such events. That's why we're trying to
get in touch with them, re member."
"But you should still add something of your own to Bob's
message."
"He agrees," Bob relayed. "He says to get another bottle—a
very small one will do—and something that will scratch glass. Do
you have a carborundum scriber, or a small diamond, Doc?"
"I can get a scriber," Bob's father said.
"He doesn't want the whole tool, just the carbo tip. He's going to
write on the inside of the bottle, and he probably couldn't
maneuver the whole tool in there even if he could get it through the
neck. He won't need a cork or sand ballast. He says he'll just tie
the new bottle to the neck of the old one, to make some thing sure
to attract attention."
"Then we can really count on being in touch with someone who
can cure Bob, at last?" It was his mother, her voice not very
steady. "It's been nice for those who could take this all as an
intellectual problem, but I haven't been able to do that."
Bob answered his mother with a simple affirmative, but the
Hunter's honesty forced him to go farther.
"If only police personnel like myself are on Earth, it may take

longer. We might have to wait for a ship to go home and return
with the specialist Bob needs."
"I don't want to mention that," Bob muttered back. "Why give
her any more to worry about?" "Don't be shortsightedly
selfish," his symbiont ad-monished him. "If events disappoint her,
you won't be in a position to care; but she has the right to reality.
You know that."
"I know you, anyway." Reluctantly, Bob relayed the Hunter's
qualification. His mother took a deep breath and shook her head.
Then she looked at her son and said, "Thanks, Hunter." Bob
raised his eye brows. "And you, of course, Son."
That ended the discussion. Bob was falling asleep, and his
parents and Maeta prepared to leave.
"When should I bring that carbide tip, Hunter?" Arthur Kinnaird
asked as they reached the door. "Tonight? I can find one all right."
"No," Bob relayed. "He'll have to leave me to do that job, and
says he won't do that before tomorrow night. You can all go back
to normal living for a day. He'll do the message tomorrow night if
I'm all right, and it can go out to the ship on Wednesday." His
father nodded understanding, and Bob was asleep a minute later.
The Hunter spent the night as usual, going over and over his
host's biochemistry in the endless effort to balance things better.
The joint pains bad been absent that day, leaving the alien to
wonder whether the infection toxins, the inactivity, Seever's
antibiotics, or even the symbiont's own absence might be
responsible. He ended the night in His usual mood of futility and
frustration.
Bob's arm progressed normally the next day, as did his other
injuries. The heart muscle was essentially healed; it had been a
clean wound, splitting muscle fibers more than tearing them. The
Hunter no longer had to pay much attention to face and ear,
though his host complained frequently of itching at both sites. The
source of these nerve signals remained obscure to the detective,
but he could not bring himself to make a major project of finding it.
Arthur brought the carbide tip during the after noon, and Seever
furnished a plain, thin-walled two-hundred-milliliter bottle; so during
the night the Hunter was able to leave Bob for a few hours to write
his message on the inner side of the glass. It was a harder job
than he had expected. The carbide cut the glass readily enough,
but a good deal of force had to be applied. He covered a quarter of
the bottle's inner surface with script which would have been
microscopic to a human being.
He tried to include all the information which might be necessary
to convince the readers of his identity— clearly they weren't at all

sure that his quarry wasn't around, too—and to let them find and
identify at least one of the human members of the group. He also
outlined his difficulty with his host's chemical machinery, making
no effort to belittle his own mistakes in the matter. He had planned
the wording carefully, and, in spite of the unexpected difficulty, was
back with his host in little over three hours.
Bob was able to rise without too much discomfort the next
morning. The wind had been high the day before, causing
everyone some uneasiness, and he insisted on accompanying
Maeta to North Beach. They were alone; it was understood that if it
was practical to go out, Maeta would bicycle back to get Bob's
mother and Mrs. Seever.
The sun was well up when they reached North Beach, for Bob
had slept fairly late. As they approached the outrigger, a small
figure which had been seated beside it rose and faced them.
Once again the Hunter was impressed by Andre's plumpness, a
rare condition among the Ell children. The generally accepted way
of life among them involved intense activity, and Daphne, he
remembered, liked to show off her very visible ribs. All three in the
group were even more impressed by the thought of what might
have happened to the outrigger be fore their arrival. However,
Maeta greeted the child with her usual calm friendliness. She
might have been about to ask, tactfully, what he was doing there,
but he didn't give her the time.
"Can I go out with you?" the boy asked. "Why?" returned
Bob.
"I want to see what you're doing. You have the Tavake's metal-
finder. I always wanted to try it and they'd never let me, and I've
been wondering what metal you could be looking for outside the
reef. No one ever drops tools there, and it wouldn't be worth
looking for them if they did. Are you treasure hunting?"
"No." Bob's tone was less cordial than was strictly tactful. "Why
do you care what grown-ups are doing? Why don't you go with the
other kids?"
"Them?" the youngster shrugged his shoulders.
"They're no fun. I'd rather see what you're doing."
"We're not tripping bikes, or playing with their brakes or
handlebars, or hiding glass in the sand," was Bob's even less
tactful answer. Andre's face became more unexpressive than
usual. Then he realized that this was hardly natural, and he put on
the appearance of surprise. Then he realized that this had come
too late, and gave another shrug.
"All right, forget it. I didn't think you'd want me. The kids you
think I should be playing with don't either. I'll think of something

else." He turned away.
Neither the Hunter nor his host could quite decide how to
respond to this bitter and pitiful remark, but Maeta did not hesitate.
"Andre, you're not making sense. If you really played the tricks
Bob mentioned, wouldn't you expect people to be too afraid of you
to want you around? And you did play them, didn't you?" The boy
eyed her silently for fully a minute.
"Sure I did," he said at last, defiantly. "You know it. Jenny
caught me out when she was talking to me the other day, and she
told you."
"How do you know she told us?"
"I heard her. I listened outside the window after she went back
to the other room with the rest of you.
Bob tried to conceal how this confession affected him. "What
did you hear?" he asked.
"Lots."
Bob had never taken lessons from his guest detective, but even
he knew better than to be specific.
"Have you listened before?"
"Sure. Lots."
"When have you listened to us?"
"In the hospital, mostly. Down by the creek, the day you and
Jenny had been out on Apu, and she and your sister went to the
library for the thing you were looking for. On the dock, the night,
you came back from the States."
"Did you try to break into my footlocker?"
"No. I was trying something else, that time. Your father said a
lot, when he got hurt picking it up."
Maeta interjected. "Andy, do you snoop like this around
everyone, or is there something about Bob and Jenny and me that
interests you?"
"I listen whenever I can. If it's no fun, I stop. You've been a lot
of fun."
"I can see where we might be," Bob said wryly.
"What's been so especially fun about us for you?"
"The green things." The child's face was still in scrutable. "The
green things that keep you from get ting hurt. One of them kept
your father from being burned up when I was little." That, the
Hunter thought, was an interesting interpretation of the event; he
wondered whether it had been edited. For the first time, he began
to think there might be something to Seever's suspicion about his
old quarry. Andre went on. "I wanted to get one for my father,
because Mother had died. Then when the other kids used to hurt
me, I wanted one for me."

"You thought, way back then, that there were green things that
kept people from being hurt?" Bob was trying to be sure.
"Of course. I saw you with it at that fire. I wondered how you got
one, and kept trying to find out who had them. I was new sure until
the other day when I saw one come part way out of your hand
while you were asleep up at the other end of the island. I walked
with you for a way after that, and wanted to ask, but I thought you
wouldn't want to tell me. I just couldn't really believe it, and I had to
make sure. You didn't get hurt, they told me, when you fell off your
bike by the library. I hadn't stayed, because I didn't think it would
work anyway—it was just an experiment. I made real sure in your
driveway."
"You certainly did," Bob admitted. He found himself at a loss for
other words. Maeta, as usual, did not.
"Andy," she asked, "did you think what would have happened if
you'd been wrong about Bob and his—green thing?"
"So I'd have been wrong. But I wasn't!" For the first time there
was an expression on the round face —one of triumph. Bob and
Maeta looked at each other; then the girl turned back to the child.
"How about Jenny's foot?" she asked. "Did you think she had
one of them, too?"
"She might have. She had been with Bob, and they were
friends. He'd give one to a friend."
"And now you know she doesn't. Are you sorry?"
"She'll be all right." A thought crossed Bob's mind and he spoke
up hastily.
"Before you try any more experiments, Andy, Maeta doesn't
have one. Neither does anyone else."
Maeta turned to the canoe. "You'd better come along with us,
Andre. You're only partly right about all this, and we'll have to
explain some things to you before something really bad happens."
"Will you help me find one of them?"
"We're looking for them, but we can't give one to you. They're
people, and if you want one to live with you you'll have to get him
to like you. Come on. Bob's arm is still bad from what you did,
because his friend can't fix broken bones any faster than they
usually heal. We were going to get someone else to help paddle,
but you'll do."
"I don't really want to go out with you, I know I asked, but I
didn't think you'd let me. The wind's too high, and I'm afraid."
"We're taking an important message—really, really important—
to the green people. We may never find them if we don't get it
there, where we think they'll be."
"Are they in the ocean?"

"Some of the time. Come along." The boy was still plainly
reluctant, but Maeta had already displayed her force of personality,
and the Hunter was not surprised when the youngster helped slide
the outrigger into the water. Neither was Bob. Both of them,
however, were uneasy about the girl's evident determination to go
out with only two paddlers, one of them certainly not very strong
and probably unskilled.
Since there was no way to ask her with the boy there—neither
Bob nor the Hunter wanted to spoil any plan she might be
considering—they could not know that Maeta had planned herself
into a corner. She did want to get the bottle out to the
spaceship; she regarded the message as vital to Bob's life. In
addition, she, too, had suspected that Andre might have done
something to her canoe, and wanted the assurance of seeing him
afloat in it. Nothing less would convince her, for the moment, that
he had played no tricks with the outrigger; and until they were
actually afloat she was expecting him to come up with some last-
minute excuse for staying behind.
The Hunter had thought along the same lines briefly, but had
realized that if his enemy were actually in the boy and persuading
him to do any of these tricks; it was perfectly possible that all the
human beings on the canoe were likely to be drowned. The other
creature would have no real interest in the welfare of its host, and
would probably consider the child well spent in a maneuver which
deprived the Hunter of his own host and an assistant. The aliens
would not suffer as the canoe splintered against the reef. They
would not drown; and filings would be back where they were
nearly eight years ago when the two representatives of the worst
and the best of Castor's culture had reached Earth. Back where
they were, except that this time the fugitive would be less likely to
make any of the mistakes which had let the Hunter find him before.
The Hunter wondered what had been done to the canoe, and
when it would make itself felt.
The wind, from the southwest was still rising. Bob and his
symbiont were getting more and more uneasy and even Maeta
was a little tense. She was beginning to wonder whether her
judgment might not have suffered briefly from tunnel vision. She
had stopped worrying about her canoe when they had reached
deep water with Andre still aboard. Like both Bob and the Hunter
in the last few weeks, she suddenly was feeling foolish; and, like
the Hunter, she was worrying about what her mistakes might now
do to other people.
In spite of the wind and her personal distraction, she found the
marker buoy above the ship with surprising speed. It was still clear

in spite of the wind, and the tanks in the lagoon which provided
direction references were easy to see. She brought the canoe
bow-on to the wind, and drew in her paddle.
"Andre, see if you can hold us here for a minute without my
help. You can see that buoy; try to keep us just where we are with
respect to it" The youngster, surprisingly to Bob, made no
argument, but dug in with his paddle.
Bob was a little slow in reading the implications of Maeta's
order, and by the time he turned to look at her she had slipped off
the shirt and slacks which had covered her swimsuit, and was on
her way overside with the bottle. Even the Hunter would have
settled for dropping the message overboard at this point, and Bob
was nearly frantic; but she gave no one time to expostulate. Bob
got only part of a sentence out be fore she disappeared, leaving
him quite literally holding his breath.
She was up again before he had to let it out, and slid aboard
with her usual seal like grace. She snatched up her paddle; and
snapped an order as she began to use it.
"Bob, be ready to lean out, or climb out, on the forward boom. I
can't head straight for the beach, but even so the rigger will be
upwind now. We're not a real double hull, and the outrigger is light;
the wind may try to pick it up. Your job is not to let that happen.
Andre, good work; keep paddling as you are."
It was much more difficult now. The wind had been more or
less behind them on the way out; now it held them back. Maeta
saw quickly that she was not allowing enough for drift, and pointed
more to the west. She finally found a heading which seemed to
offer a vector sum leading to the beach, but even Andre could see
that it would be a long time getting them there. Maeta evidently
decided it would take too long; after a few minutes she turned
almost straight west, out to sea away from Ell.
''What's the idea?" Bob shouted over the wind. , "We can't
make it back. Andre is wearing out, and I don't think I'll last that
long myself. I want to get clear of the reef, and northwest is the
quickest way. You can get off the boom, now."
"But we'll be blown out to sea!"
"I know. But Island Eight is about thirty-five miles away, and
straight downwind as nearly as I can judge. We won't have much
trouble hitting it—there's a com pass here. We'll see it from miles
away, and the tank there is unusually high, so if we miss the line a
little we can still correct before we get there. Right now the
important thing is to clear Ell's reef."
"And stay, afloat."
Maeta gestured that qualification away with a toss of her head.

She knew there was no worry from wind or wave on the open sea
as long as she could manipulate a paddle. The confidence of
competence was perhaps slightly inflated, by the arrogance of
youth, but she did know what she was doing. The error of putting
to sea at all that day had been the result of attaching too much
weight to factors unrelated to the weather; she would, she still felt,
do the same thing again as long as she could feel reasonably sure
of delivering the message.
"How about the reef at Eight?" yelled Bob. "I've never been
there."
"Neither have I," was the answer, "but Charlie says the
passage is on this side and wide enough to be no problem—the
tankers get in. Keep paddling just a little longer, Andy; you're doing
fine."
She had gradually been heading more to the north as they
drew away from Ell. Now, sure of her clear ance, she bore around
to the northeast and put the wind directly behind them. Andre was
allowed to stop paddling, and Maeta herself eased off her efforts to
what was necessary to hold their heading. They passed the
northwest fringe of Ell's reef with two or three hundred yards to
spare, though the breakers looked un-comfortably close to Bob.
Then there was empty sea before them. Maeta had estimated
their speed, from the time it took to pass familiar objects along the
northern reef, at about six knots—the wind, of course, was much
higher, but had much less grip on the outrigger than the water did.
This meant that the best part of six hours would be needed to
reach Island Eight.
There was no danger of anyone's going to sleep. The canoe
pitched violently enough to make it necessary to hold on most of
the time, and spray blown from the tops of the waves made it
necessary to bail fairly often. It was not, except for the first few
minutes of doubt, a frightening trip even for the boy. None of them
was really comfortable in the wind and spray, of course; Maeta put
her slacks and shirt back on, soaked as they were, and Andre,
who was clad only in shorts, forgot his independence and
indifference enough to snuggle close to Bob for warmth. The
Hunter thought of making a direct check for the presence of his
not-certainly-dead quarry in the youngster's body, but could not be
sure that it would be safe. If the boy moved very much, especially
if he pulled away, while the alien was partly in one body and partly
in the other, the results would be extremely unfortunate. The
detective could of course afford to lose a few tiny tendrils, as he
had at the ship, but such appendages might not be enough to find
the other being. If the fugitive were actually there, he was aware of

the Hunter's presence in Bob's body from the latter's recovery from
the heart wound, and would be hiding—withdrawn into a single
mass, or a few small masses, in body cavities, rather than spread
out through the boy's system in a network ready for protective
duty.
The Hunter mentioned all this to his host, and Bob agreed that
unless the boy fell asleep the direct search would be unwise.
Andre did not fall asleep.
By mid-afternoon, the tank of Island Eight was visible directly
ahead. It was of experimental design, more than twice the usual
twelve-to-fifteen-foot height of PFI's culture tanks, and visible from
a much greater distance.
Unfortunately, the experiment had not been very successful,
and at the moment the unit was unused and the small atoll it
occupied was uninhabited.
Half an hour after the first sighting, the breakers marking the
reef became visible. At first, they stretched an equal distance to
each side of the bow, with no sign of a break. Even Maeta was
getting tense —it would soon be impossible to clear either side of
the white water—when they finally sighted the pas sage, a little to
their left. The girl altered their course slightly, and presently told
Andre to start paddling again. Bob and the Hunter, neither able to
do any thing constructive, could only watch with increasing tension
as the breakers drew closer. An occasional glance back at Maeta's
face was somewhat reassuring, but not entirely; one could
interpret her expression as one either of concentration or of worry.
The passage might, as Maeta's brother had said, be wide
enough for a small tanker, but it looked awkwardly narrow at the
moment. It was straight, the girl knew—it would have been made
so for the tankers if it had not been that way naturally—but
unfortunately it was not quite in the wind's direction. Once into it,
they would have to paddle hard to the right to avoid being blown
into the left side of the channel. Maeta, to give them as much room
as possible for leeway, cut as closely as she dared to the breakers
on the right as they entered.
The reef was low, and gave no protection at all from the wind. It
broke the waves, but this was worse than useless; instead of
coming harmlessly under their stern and lifting the canoe for a
moment, the water now was hurled skyward by the coral and
shredded into spray by the wind. As the outrigger made its turn
into the passage, everyone aboard was blinded, and the canoe
itself began to fill rapidly.
"Both of you bail!" cried Maeta. "I'll do the paddling!"
She could not see where they were going, and her only way to

maintain heading was to keep the impact of the spray on the right
side of her back. No one with only human senses and muscles
could have done much better.
They emerged from the worst of the spray to find themselves
almost on the coral that rimmed the left side of the passage. Maeta
made a frantic effort to sweep them still more to the right, but
simply wasn't strong enough. They very nearly made it, but struck
unyielding coral only a yard or two from the relative safety of the
lagoon.
The main hull of the canoe may have survived briefly, but the
three human bodies were hurled for ward. Bob struck Andre a split
second before Maeta hurtled into both of them. There was another
violent bump which they deduced later was the boy striking the
bow of the canoe. The tangled bodies did a half somersault, found
themselves either under water or in spray too dense to let them
breathe, and felt one more violent shock. Then they were lying
together on hard sand, spray still blowing over them.
Bob was conscious and not too badly hurt. The
Hunter had taken care, reflexively, of a number of small cuts from
coral, but he had been cushioned to a large extent by the other
two bodies. Neither of these was nearly as well off.

13. Reconstruction

Andre was unconscious, but had only minor visible cuts and
scrapes. Though this would have been a good time to check for
the presence of a symbiont, Bob paid little attention to him,
because Maeta was in far worse condition. She had been
underneath when they hit the coral. Deep cuts covered her back
and hips, and much flesh had been torn from her right leg. Arterial
blood was spurting over the sand, and being quickly diluted to
invisibility by the spray.
Bob and his partner saw and evaluated the situation instantly,
and reacted almost as promptly. The human member of the team
grasped the injured leg just above the knee, pressed the heel of
his hand against the most prominent source of bleeding, and
snapped to his partner, "Get in there and earn your living! I'll hold
on long enough to be sure you're there, but give me a twinge, in
the palm of the hand ten seconds or so before you're completely
out of me."
The Hunter, just for a moment, thought of objecting on the
grounds that Bob was his primary responsibility and was also
injured. He even started to mention this, though he had already
started the transfer and knew what Bob's answer would be. He

was right.
"Stop dithering," snarled the young man. "None of these nicks
will let me bleed to death even if my clot ting isn't up to par, and
she'll be dead in five minutes if you don't take care of her. I can't
hold all this bleed ing; I haven’t enough hands. I assume you've
already taken care of any infecting organisms that got into me, and
even if you haven't you can come back, or partly back, to do it
later. And don't waste time going just through my hand—I know
what you look like, and it's years too late to shock me. Hurry up!"
The alien obeyed, and within half a minute had the worst of the
girl's bleeding stopped. It took four or five more to complete the
transfer, partly because he found it difficult to pull himself away
from the regions of Bob's injuries. It took a surprising effort to force
intelligence to overcome habit; he was somewhat addicted to Bob,
in a sense, too.
He was relieved, though quite surprised, to find that Maeta had
no fractures, though several fragments of coral had broken off at
the impact and were deeply imbedded in the injured leg. Her
unconsciousness was due entirely to loss of blood, and he had to
take rapid steps to counteract shock.
What she really needed most was replacement ma terial—food.
The easiest way to provide this would have been for the Hunter to
catch and digest some thing, and release amino acids into her
circulatory system. If there had been a dead fish or crab beside
her it would have helped greatly. There wasn't, how ever, and with
the wind and spray still lashing the islet on which they were
stranded, there would be little chance for Bob to find anything even
if he knew of the need.
Bob himself at the moment was more concerned with the small
boy. He examined the limp form as carefully as possible,
ascertained that at least none of the major limbs was fractured,
and straightened him out into a more comfortable position. There
was a little bleeding from relatively minor nicks and scrapes, but
this was already stopping. Bob's was not, but he refused to worry
about it yet. His broken arm seemed to be no worse than it bad
been.
While he was considering what to do, the shadow of the tank
gradually extended across the islet. Even Bob, used to New
England temperatures, felt a new chill in his wet clothes, and
realized that something would have to be done for the night if the
injured ones were not to die of exposure. Tropical Pacific water
and tropical Pacific air are not very cold, but they are below human
body temperature and can carry heat from a human body faster
than that body can replace it.

For warmth, all Bob could think of was a hole in the sand. He
scooped out one big enough for the three of them and covered
them all, fairly completely, with more sand. This was wet with the
spray, of course, but water did not move through it very fast; once
it was warm, it stayed so. The combined heat loss of the three
bodies dropped to a level their combined metabolisms—the
Hunter's didn't count significantly—could offset.
The detective took advantage of the situation to send a
pseudopod into Bob's ear and tell him about Maeta's real need for
food. It was a slightly risky action, but he could have spared the
tissue if Bob had moved inopportunely. He could probably, for that
matter, have recovered it.
With much less danger he explored the unconscious Andre and
established that there was no symbiont in the child's body; the boy
was genuinely plump. He also had a broken collar bone which Bob
had missed, but there was nothing the Hunter could do about this.
Setting it was far beyond his strength. The boy regained
consciousness during the night. He was no longer self-possessed;
he wept loudly and almost continuously, partly from pain and partly
from terror. For the first time since the fire accident which Jenny
had tried to use as a lesson, he was realizing that really serious
things, not just minor pain that a "green thing" could take care of,
could happen to him. Bob, wide awake because of his own
discomfort, sympathized, yet he also hoped that the event would
prove educational for Andre.
The night proved long even for the Hunter, who had plenty to
keep him from boredom. It took several hours to work the
fragments of coral out of Maeta's tissue without doing even more
damage. He could do nothing to speed the formation of new blood
cells or other tissue until food was available, but he held the torn
flesh in, position so that healing need not involve extensive bridges
of scar tissue. As long as the young woman remained
unconscious, nothing needed to be done about pain, and she was
unlikely to wake up for many hours with so much blood gone. The
alien was ready for it when it should happen, how ever.
He had some cause to feel useful. Without him she would have
been dead in minutes from blood loss; or, failing that, from shock
within an hour or two. If he could stay with her for a few days, she
would not even be scarred, a factor which the girl herself would
certainly appreciate and which, the Hunter had reason to suspect,
would also be appreciated by his own host.
That left him free to worry about Bob, who must certainly have
picked up more infecting microorganisms from the sand in his
unclotted wounds. The Hunter had indeed disposed of the original

ones, but recent experience had made it clear that it would not
take long to get his partner back into serious trouble. The Hunter
hoped he would not have to decide between Bob and Maeta.
There was no question where his responsibility lay, but if he saved
Bob and let the girl die, the former would be extremely hard to live
with for a time.
The wind was much weaker by sunrise, and an hour later they
were no longer being soaked by spray from the reef. Bob removed
the sand cover to let the sun warm them, looked over his own
scratches with out saying anything to the Hunter, and bent to
examine Andre. The boy had been quiet for some time, and the
conscious members of the group had hoped that he was asleep,
but he answered at once when Bob asked how he felt.
"Terrible," was the answer. "My shoulder hurts, and I'm cold
and hungry."
"You'll probably be too warm when the sun gets a little higher.
There's no shade here. We should be able to find some shellfish. I
don't know what I can do about your shoulder; let me see."
The boy sat up, but shrank away the moment he was touched.
"That hurts. Stop it."
"All right," Bob said. "I'm no doctor, anyway, and you didn't give
me much chance to feel, but you'd better assume that something
is broken in there, and keep it still." The Hunter had not reported to
Bob on the boy's condition. "Does it hurt to move your arm?"
"Yes. A lot."
"Then let's get my shirt off and let me try to make it into a sling
for you, so the arm won't move. You'll have to decide whether you
want to put up with the pain while I do that, so there'll be less pain
later, or not. I'm not going to waste time arguing."
"Leave it alone. Why can't your green thing help me?"
"He's busy with Maeta, who needs him a lot worse than you
do." The boy looked at Maeta closely for the first time, turned
visibly pale, and said nothing for several seconds. Then he looked
at his own shoulder, which was by now covered with a single huge
area of blue, black, and yellow bruise. He seemed about to say
something, looked back at Maeta's torn back and leg, and walked
away down the beach.
"Find some shellfish!" Bob called after him. There was no
answer.
"I'll find something for you and Mae, Hunter," Bob said, giving
up Andre as a minor problem for the moment "Stand by a couple
of minutes. There'll surely be something around, since you're not
choosy. I'll have to work fast; these cuts of mine are starting to hurt
a lot, and I may have to stay put in a little while and let you work

on both of us, if you possibly can."
The Hunter had no way of answering. He thought intensely as
he watched Bob walk off after the boy, through the temporary eye
he had improvised. It might have been better for Bob to go in the
opposite direction, but there was no opposite direction to go; they
were at the end of a small island immediately beside the reef
passage. The two or three hundred yards of sand to the northwest,
merging into coral on the side toward the breakers, were their total
re source area. There were other islets around the atoll, and the
culture tank occupied most of the tiny la goon, but the canoe was
gone. Two of them could not possibly swim, and Bob was not likely
to take the risk in his present condition. It might be impossible for
him, too, in a few hours.
The Hunter decided to waste a little of Maeta's blood, and
began to permit clots to form over her in juries. She might have to
hold the rest of it in by her-self for a while.
Bob was back in a minute or two with a large fish which
seemed to have been washed through the reef and stranded. It
was in very unappetizing condition for a human being, but quite
usable for the Hunter. He set it down beside the still, unconscious
girl; the alien extruded tissue from her skin, enveloped the fish,
and began salvaging amino adds and carbohydrates. It massed
ten or twelve pounds, quite enough for immediate needs. The
Hunter concentrated on his job, but tried to keep aware of the
other two.
They found enough food to keep them going, though Bob was
not at all fond of shellfish; but as the day wore on, the far more
serious question of water began to loom.
There was no spring or rivulet on the little island. The few pools
which existed had been filled by the spray, and were rapidly
vanishing in any case. Bob considered complaining to be beneath
him, but the child did not, and his whines about his thirst alternated
with questions about when they could expect to be rescued.
Bob was optimistic about this. "They know we were out in
Mae's canoe, or they could have found out soon enough when we
didn't show up for supper. They'd know which way the wind would
send us. The Dumbo was at Tahiti, but they'd call it down by radio
this morning, and this island will be about the first place they'll
look. If you want to be useful in stead of noisy, go and make a
great big "S O S" on the beach—as big as you can fit between the
coral and the lagoon. I expect they'll see us easily enough anyway,
since there's nothing to hide us, but that would catch an eye from
farther away."
The Hunter took Bob's words at their face value, since they

seemed reasonable, and stopped worrying about water as far as
the males were concerned; they could last for a day or so. Maeta,
however, could not; she had lost far too much blood. She regained
consciousness about noon, and the symbiont explained the
situation to her, vibrating her hearing apparatus as he normally did
Bob's. She took it calmly enough, but her first words were also
about water. The Hunter admitted that none was available.
"Are you sure you can't do anything about that?" she asked. "I
don't want to sound like a crybaby, but I don't know all about your
powers. I know you can do funny things with body chemistry, and I
wondered if you could take the salt out of sea water if I drank it, or
maybe filter it out of the water before it got into us? Or could a
person dip an arm or a leg into the sea, and have you bring in just
water through the skin and leave the salt outside?"
The Hunter admitted that this might be possible; there were
organisms on his world which possessed desalting organs, though
he knew only in a very general way how these worked.
"It will certainly take energy," the detective pointed out. "It's a
pity that you, who need the water most be-cause of your blood
loss, have such a poor food reserve. I did feed you a lot from the
fish Bob brought, but most of it's already gone to repair and
reconstruction. I'm not really sure I can do this desalting trick,
since I've never had to do it before, but I'll try. Ask Bob to get you
into the water."
"Even if you can't do it," she said, "it will be more comfortable
there. It's pretty hot here on the sand. I remember long ago when I
was working out on one of the reef islets at Ell, and the people
who were sup posed to pick me up were late, I felt a lot better just
by lying in the water while I waited. Maybe a person's skin can
take water out of the ocean anyway."
The Hunter assured her that it could not—that water would
normally tend to flow the other way, if at all, osmosis being what it
was. To his surprise, she knew what he was talking about, and
conceded the point, theoretically.
"But then I should have gotten thirstier that day, and not felt
better," she remarked. The Hunter, willing to prolong any
discussion to keep the girl's mind off her very genuine thirst,
pointed out that the human species seemed to him a very
suggestible one. She did not answer this; Bob had approached,
and she was telling him what the Hunter had said about getting her
into the water. Bob, of course, knew the osmosis situation equally
well and rather doubted the practicality of the attempt, but decided
not to argue with the Hunter. The water, fortunately, was only a
few feet away, and with a little help from the girl her self he got her

legs and feet immersed as much as the very shallow slope of the
beach allowed. The Hunter sent out his own tissue through her
skin, and tried to remember what he had learned about desalting
glands.
It was a difficult job. His chemical senses operated essentially on
large molecules such as proteins and polysaccharides; he could
identify and distinguish these by means most nearly analogous to
the human sense of touch. It was intuitively obvious to him why
many of them behaved as they did in a human organism—or any
other living thing—just as a simple gear train is obvious in its
operation to most human beings. However, if the same human
being, who had no training in complex mechanics, were suddenly
to be con fronted with the maintenance of a twenty-eight cylinder
"corncob" airplane engine, he would be in somewhat the Hunter's
situation faced with the up keep of a living body from a planet his
people had not visited before.
The salt problem looked simpler, but actually branched out into
another field. It was a little like asking a mechanic who had been
trained on the air plane engine to work on a television set. The
sodium and chloride ions, as well as the magnesium and other
chemical species in sea water, were very different from proteins—
far smaller, and too uniformly charged to offer a handle to most of
the alien's sensing and manipulating powers. He knew that all
living cells had selective permeability to such things by nature of
their chemical architecture. He knew some of the ways in which
this was done, but by no means all of them; even to him, a cell
was a very complex structure. On a scale which represents a
water molecule by a fairly large pea, a human red blood cell is
over half a mile across, and has much detail to be learned by
anyone proposing to repair or alter its structure—or even imitate it.
There were many members of the Hunter's species to whom
the construction of an effective desalting gland would have been a
trivial matter, but the highly experienced detective was not among
them.
He tried, butt asking Maeta occasionally how she felt was
superfluous. He knew that he was getting very little deionized
water through her skin.
Bob kept feeding them, and of course a certain amount of water
was available from the oxidized foods, but it was not enough to
keep the girl comfort able. The Hunter could, and did, block the
nerves which would have been transmitting excruciating pain from
her injuries, but the thirst sensation was far more subtle in origin,
and he could do nothing about it.
Maeta did not complain, but sometimes she could not help

saying something which showed how she felt. She never blamed
the Hunter or anyone else, except once to comment on her own
poor judgment in putting to sea when she had. But to the detective
the whole situation was obviously his own fault. His feelings of guilt
never wavered. He wished she would not talk at all, but could not
bring himself to ask her not to.
It was fortunate that he did not. It was one of her remarks
which dropped the most important piece of the jigsaw puzzle into
place for him. The remark was painful to him, painful enough so
that he could not resist arguing, in fact, but it proved useful.
"I'm afraid I felt better the other time I fought thirst this way,
Hunter," she said. "I suppose it isn't working so well this time
because I've been hurt so. You're sure I won't die of thirst this
time?"
"Unless it takes two or three days for us to be found," the
symbiont assured her, "you're in no real danger. With enough
food, I could get the water to keep you alive indefinitely, though
perhaps not very comfortably. I'm getting a little into you from the
sea, too—more than would come through your skin with out help,
in spite of what you were saying."
"That's hard to believe," she said slowly and drowsily. "The
other time I didn't get thirsty at all. I re member." The Hunter was
slightly irritated by his failure at what the human beings considered
a simple job. His answer showed this slightly.
"It may have been your additional reserves, Maeta, but I
suspect it's just ordinary human good-old-times reaction," he said.
"There is just no way that significant amounts of water—even sea
water-—could get through your skin, which is effectively designed
to keep water inside your system. If any did get in, it wouldn't help
your thirst at all.”
"It did. I remember. Twice."
"But you weren't hurt, and you were only a few hours without
water, and you knew it was coming soon. You've never been in a
situation like this, I'm sure."
"I wasn't hurt, no, and the first time, you're right-it was only five
or six hours and I'd emptied my can teen without thinking how long
I was going to be there. I was a little careless in those days. The
second time I'd accidentally spilled my bucket during the first hour,
and I'd done a lot of work and was really thirsty before I noticed it
had tipped. The boat didn't come back to pick me up until way after
dark. It was a very long day. And I soaked in the lagoon. And I
didn't get thirsty."
A thought crossed the Hunter's mind, startling enough to
silence him for several seconds while he tried to work out its

implications.
Finally he asked, "How long ago was all this? The last two or
three years, or back when you were very young?"
Maeta answered with no hesitation. "Not very long ago. Both
times, I was collecting for the Museum Ex change—that's the
group that arranges trades of specimens between exhibitors and
collectors all over the world—and I didn't start working with them
until after I started at the library, of course. I didn't know about
them until then." "Less than three years, then."
"About that," she agreed.
The Hunter decided not to ask for details about the
carelessness she had been showing at about that time. She was a
very alert young woman, he had come to realize^ and lie did not
want her thinking, just yet, along the lines which had just occurred
to him. He was not sure enough yet; one didn't jump to
conclusions, at least not out loud.
Also, he didn't know whether to be annoyed at the waste of the
time spent on looking for spaceships, or to be relieved that there
would be no need to deliver anymore messages to the one with
the booby trap.

14. Professional

The amphibian settled onto Eight's lagoon about an hour before
sunset, and taxied close to the beach where the castaways were
waiting. A rubber dinghy emerged from the waist hatch, followed
by Dr. Seever. He paddled ashore without waiting for anyone to
accompany him, and looked over the three standing and lying at
the water's edge. He whistled gently as he saw Maeta.
"Ladies first, it looks like," he remarked as he stepped out of the
dinghy and pulled it ashore. He started to bend down for a closer
examination, and was visibly startled at the cheerful way the girl
spoke.
"I'm reasonably all right, Doctor," she said. The Hunter is with me,
and all I need is a gallon or so of water. Better check up on Bob;
he got some cuts when we landed."
"I'll last," Bob forestalled questioning. "I was getting feverish
two or three hours ago, and Mae noticed it. She told the Hunter to
come over and clean me out. I objected, but you don't argue with
her, as you may have noticed. She had the Hunter on her side,
any way. He took care of the bugs and went back to her, so I'm all
right for a while."
"And how about me?" asked Andre".
"A broken shoulder, I think," Bob said to the doc tor. "He may

look the best, if you don't count that bruise, but he probably does
need you the most."
Seever sighed. "Hunter, if your people really decide to make
close contact with humanity, medical practice is certainly going to
change a lot. I suppose I should be grateful that it won't disappear
entirely, though maybe I wouldn't mind retiring early at that. Come
on, all of you. I'll work on you in the plane, Andy; I gather you've
joined the group."
"Well," said Bob, "we have to do something to keep him from
sticking skewers through people just to see if they can live through
it. Maybe you should train him as a surgical assistant, Doc."
By the time the amphibian reached Ell, Seever had immobilized
the broken shoulder, used human remedies on Bob's contusions,
and dressed Maeta's in juries for the sake of appearances. The
Hunter was impatient to get back, since he did not want to discuss
his new conclusions in front of Andre, who could be counted on to
contribute to the violation of several regulations if he heard them.
The boy had been convinced for the moment that he should keep
word of the "green things" to himself by stressing the earlier
argument—that they didn't want the word to get around, and would
be unlikely to form friendships with anyone who let out their secret.
It was obvious that more steps were going to have to be taken, but
no one knew just what they would be.
The main thing was to get a Castorian professional
xenobiologist to work on Bob, and the Hunter wanted to get back
to Ell for that purpose. He had finally decided which were the key
data, and fitted them together into a coherent picture—the moving
generator shield, the booby-trapped spaceship, the fact that the
fugitive's ship was in so much better shape than his own had
been, the room in the library with the large armchair, the library
itself, Maeta's session of carelessness and her experience in
fighting thirst with a dip in the sea, and the results of his own
staying with Bob for over seven years. He was sure that police
procedure meant little now, since the Castorian police had left long
before. What he needed was the head quarters of the team which
was evaluating Earth and humanity.
And it was quite obvious where they were. There remained just
the small, practical problem of getting in touch with a group of
scientists who had been-warned that a dangerous criminal might
still be loose on Earth, without being killed by them. The messages
at the ship were useless; the scientists might possibly visit it once
a year, if they felt they could spare the time. Another message had
to be delivered, but not to the ship. The place was obvious now,
and the Hunter was angry with himself for not thinking of it earlier.

The method of delivery was almost as obvious, but the Hunter
rather hoped that his human colleagues would make themselves
look as foolish as he himself had done. He was quite frank about
this, when the entire in-group except Andre were gathered in
Maeta's hospital room the night of their rescue from Eight. The girl
had quickly mastered the art of relaying what he said to her,
without having to pause to listen to him, and the exposition went
smoothly.
"First," he started with a question, "is young Andre safely
asleep? He's displayed more skill than I like at hearing what isn't
meant for him."
"He's in the next room, but sound asleep," Seever replied. "He
was uncomfortable enough to accept medication."
"And you're absolutely sure he took it?"
"Yes. I watched him drink it, made sure it wasn't spilled
anywhere, and had him talk to me afterward to be sure his mouth
was empty. I'm learning, old as I am."
"All right," Maeta relayed. "I am now quite sure I know where to
get in touch with the evaluation team from my home world, and we
should be able to do it tomorrow. I feel very silly at not seeing it
before, and wasting so much of everyone's time and effort, not to
mention extending the danger to Bob's life and bringing danger to
Jenny and Mae. I want to go through my detailed idea of what has
happened on Ell during the last seven years, not because I feel the
need for drama but because if I can get through the account
without any of you seeing where my people must be, I won't have
to feel so foolish. Several mystery novels which Bob had read
suggested the technique to me; forgive me if the suspense makes
any of you uncomfortable.
"When we disposed of my original quarry—and it seems that
we really did dispose of him, Doctor, and though absolute proof
would be hard to supply, I examined Andre carefully—I was
convinced that I was hopelessly lost from my own people. I had an
unrealistic idea of the number of stars in the volume of space
whose radius I had traversed. I don't blame myself greatly; a view
of the star clouds of the Milky Way is extremely deceptive. Look at
a photograph in any of your popular astronomy books; you will
certainly not realize that a fair model of this part of the galaxy
could he made by scattering tennis balls with an average
separation of a thousand miles.
"After Bob and I had taken an astronomy course while he was
in college, I realized that it should actually be quite simple for my
people to trace us, and that a search had most probably been
conducted. I am now quite sure that one of our ships reached

Earth some, time before March, 1949—your data, Mae—within
fifteen months after we disposed of my quarry. They detected his
ship but not mine, probably because mine was far more badly
damaged, and sea water had reached and corroded the units
whose force fields are normally detectable from a distance. They
investigated his ship, identified it, explored his possible paths to
Ell, and found the generator case on Apu, just as we had earlier.
They had, after all, the advantage of knowing that such an object
was missing from his ship, and must have looked for it specifically.
"Not finding any trace of me or my ship, they assumed that I had
either failed to reach Earth at all, or had been killed by the crash,
by Earth life, or by my quarry. It is also possible that they did find
my ship, and deduced from its condition that I had never reached
shore."
"But how could you have been killed by the crash?" asked Mrs.
Kinnaird. "As I understand it, your ship was merely flattened, not
burned or exploded. Merely mashing you up wouldn't kill you."
"You exaggerate a little," replied the Hunter, "but what probably
would have killed me was the marine life. I told Bob and Jenny
about my troubles while I was down in the pipe. If I hadn't met that
shark, I might very well not have survived to reach Ell and find
Bob." The woman nodded understanding and the alien went on.
"In any case, my friends assumed that I was out of the picture, and
that my quarry was loose somewhere on Earth—they hoped, but
could not be sure, on Ell.
"Naturally they didn't find him. I suppose it's lucky they didn't
find me, under the circumstances, though I might possibly have
been able to identify myself to them in time. Anyway, they
concluded the unsuccessful search, booby-trapped my quarry's
ship, and went back home. Their report caused an evaluation team
to be assembled and sent here. They arrived over three years
ago—again from your data, Mae."
"I don't see that," the girl said, interrupting her own translation.
"I'm delighted. You will. I skipped one point; sorry. The police
would have been the ones to move the generator shield, partly to
experiment with it, to see why our quarry might have left it where
he did, partly to prevent him from using it again too easily—he
might, for all they could know, have been wandering around on
Apu at the time. One of them would have stayed with it, probably
armed with a paralyzer, in case the other did find it; but what
happened was Maeta's picking it up."
"You mean one of your people was inside that thing when I took
it home?" Maeta exclaimed.
"I'd be glad to bet any reasonable sum you like; and

considering the date you found it, I'm sure it was one of the police
group, not the later arrivals. You didn't look inside, I take it."
"Not carefully. It seemed to be full of sand, and I left it outdoors
to dry out before I took it into the house."
"Exactly. Into your house. One of your family, probably you,
became host for a time to that policeman."
"But he never tried to talk to me!"
"Of course not. No emergency. He didn't find him self isolated
halfway around your planet at his first chance to look through your
eyes, as I did." The Hunter addressed the entire group again.
"I doubt that he stayed with Mae very long; he'd have wanted to
move around a lot in his investigation. There must be a lot of ex-
hosts around Ell at the mo ment.
"The next group eventually came, and started where the police
had left off. They probably paid little if any attention to the booby-
trapped ship. I'm sorry about that, as I said; it was a reasonable
theory originally, but general procedures have to be modified by
specific situations. My mistake was in taking too long to see how
the specific situations applied. Any way, the evaluation team
came, and is here now. They're doing a job likely to take five or ten
of your years. If the police reported human beings to be as
different as they should have, there are probably fifty or so
members of the team—including several of the specialists we
need to get Bob back together. We'll take a note to their
headquarters tomorrow."
"Where's that?' asked Jenny.
"I'll go along with your game, Hunter," said Maeta. "You implied
that I'd served as a host another time. Is that relevant to your
Agatha Christie puzzle? Bob, did you, ever feel this creature
grinning?"
"Cant say that I did," was, the answer. "Let him go on."
The detective continued. "It is very relevant. I expect one of you
to come up with the answer at any moment. Yes, Maeta, you were
a host, probably several times. I suppose they shifted hosts often
to avoid doing what I did to Bob—as I should have one, I see now.
At least once, you had an expert who could manipulate the
desalting operation; you were quite right, you really didn't get
thirsty that time you were stranded on the reef."
"But why would they use me several times? There are a couple
of hundred people on Ell—at least a hundred and fifty even if a lot
of the children are too small."
"A strong and healthy host is very desirable; spending all our
time in protection and repair is hardly life. We like to do things of
our own, and the evaluation team members would have a great

deal to do. Much more to the point, Mae," the girl continued to
trans late in spite of the personal nature of the next sentences,
"you are one of the most conveniently located and occupied
people on this island, for any member of the headquarters group of
the evaluation team. Think, Miss Teroa. A space where an
enormous volume of information about Earth and its people is
stored in organized form. A place where a host can conveniently
be made to feel sleepy if the symbiont wants to work alone for a
time, and where a human being can unobtrusively be anesthetized
briefly with out risking his falling and hurting himself, if one of the
team needs to spend a while with a host. You told Bob it was a
very comfortable chair."
Maeta had not yet achieved Bob's skill at communicating with
the Hunter without speaking aloud, but she tried.
"That last gives Bob and me an unfair advantage, don't you
think? I see it now. Should I speak up?"
"Bob hasn't Go ahead." The girl nodded, and spoke aloud.
"All right Doctor, if you can lend me a crutch, I'll go to work
tomorrow. There's still plenty to be done downstairs. If the Hunter
will write a note in his own language tonight, I'll tuck it into that
chair that Old Toke found too comfortable; and some time during
the morning I'll take a rest in it. Maybe a larger sign that I can prop
up on the table, so it can be read from the sides of the room,
calling attention to the note in the chair, would also be a good idea.
If I hear anyone coming, I can slip it under a book, so there won't
be any violation of the rules. All right, Hunter?"
It was quite all right

15. Official, from Headquarters

The Hunter's principal trouble, though not his only one, during
the next several months stemmed from the personality of the
specialist who took over Bob. This being was an intolerant and
tactless individual who attached much weight to professional
competence, had a high—fortunately justified—opinion of his own
abilities, and failed completely to see how the detective could have
been so stupid as to remain with a single host of a new species for
such a long time. Since the Hunter had no excuse and had al
ready been blaming himself for the slip, his own self-esteem was
not healing at all rapidly. The fact that Bob disliked his new
symbiont, made no bones about saying so, and openly looked
forward to the time when he could have the Hunter back was some
com fort to the latter, but not very much. Fortunately this attitude
made no difference to the specialist, who regarded the young man

as an interesting specimen, not a personal friend. The closest he
came to approving of anything the Hunter had done made this
more than clear.
The two were in direct contact, a situation which permitted their
multi-purpose "cells" to act as nerves and transmit information
between them at speeds far greater than oral speech could
manage. The Hunter, was in the library chair; Bob' was seated
there to permit the communication, carefully keeping his hands
motionless on the stuffed arms.
"I must admit," the xenobiologist said, "that there has been one
good result of your stupidity. I have been able to find out more
about this species in a few months, from the various things you did
to this being, than I could have ascertained from several years of
legal experimentation. It is quite possible that in two or three more
years I will be able to resolve the techniques which will allow us to
live full time with these beings."
"Then Bob is going to be all right? You expect to be able to
study him for years?"
"Of course. Isn't that what I implied? You are allowing yourself
to be distracted from straightforward joint thinking."
"Why didn't you tell me sooner?"
"It was not important," said Xeno, as Bob had named him.
"It was to me," returned the Hunter. "You sound like one of
those unreal scientists in the stories Bob reads. Do you know what
a friend is?"
"Certainly. I have a number of friends myself but your forming a
close attachment to a member of this species was rather
premature. In any case, it will be several years before I can allow
you to resume symbiosis with this one. If you plan to remain on
Earth, you should start living with other human beings I can permit
you to practice, but you are not to re main with any individual for
more than half of one of their years. I suppose you will want to
confine yourself to those who, as a result of your incompetence,
already know about us."
"It would be a lot better than living in this library, even if the
food does come regularly now—you'll have to admit that's an
improvement on silverfish and the crumbs from librarians'
lunches."
"It is more convenient, I grant. I trust you are not developing
this highly subjective attitude human beings call taste, however.
Food is fuel; as long as the quantity is sufficient, there is no reason
to complain."
The Hunter broke contact, Xeno informed Bob that the
conversation was over—the alien had learned English in

connection with his evaluation work in the library—and the
detective had no contact with the specialist for several days.
He spent some of the time with Maeta, whose in juries were
completely healed, and reported Xenon’s words to her.
"Then Bob is really going to be all right?" she asked. "He's
looked so much happier, and doesn't have the fatigue or the joint
pains any more, but I couldn't be sure that Xeno had really gotten
to the cause of things."
"He knew that from the beginning," the Hunter ad mitted. "The
problem was that I'd done so much dam age that there was no
certainty for a long time that it could be repaired. I thought I'd
admitted that to you."
"You did," conceded the girl, "but I was hoping you'd forgotten.
You were feeling pretty awful about the whole thing, and it wasn't
really your fault. You couldn't have done anything else."
"Not at first," the alien admitted, "but later on I should have
swapped around to other hosts. There were Bob's parents, and the
doctor, who knew about me."
"Would you need that many? Wouldn't just back and forth
between two people be all right?"
"I'd think so, but I'm not sure. I could ask Xeno. But isn't it
rather academic now, anyway?"
"Not entirely," Maeta said. "You find out—and make sure when
that cold-blooded molecule manipulator is going to be through with
Bob, while you're at it. I think I can hold hands with him long
enough for you two to get that much of a message across. Now
think over those lessons in biochem that Xeno ordered you to
memorize; I have book work to do."

About the Author

Hal Clement (Harry Clement Stubbs) was born in Massachusetts
in 1922. He has been a science lover from early childhood, at least
partly as a result of a 1930 Buck Rogers panel in which villains
were "headed for Mars, forty-seven million miles away." His father,
an accountant, couldn't answer the resulting questions, and led
little Hal to the local library. The result was irreversible brain
influence.
He majored in astronomy at Harvard, and has since acquired
master's degrees in education and in chemistry. He earns his
basic living as a teacher of chemistry and astronomy at Milton
Academy, in Massachusetts, and regards science-fiction writing
and painting as hobbies. His first two stories, "Proof" and
"Impediment," were sold when he was a junior in college; their

impression on Harvard's $400 yearly tuition secured family
tolerance for that crazy Buck Rogers stuff.
He has since produced half a dozen novels, of which the best
known are Needle and Mission of Gravity. His reputation among
science-fiction enthusiasts is that of a "bard" writer—one who tries
to stick faithfully to the physical sciences as they are currently
understood; like Arthur C. Clarke and the late Willy Ley, Clement
would never dream of having a space ship fall into the sun merely
because its engines broke down. He can do his own orbit com
puting, and does.
He leads a double life, appearing frequently at science fiction
conventions as Hal Clement and spending the rest of his time in
Milton as Harry Stubbs, the rather square science teacher with a
wife of twenty-five years and three grown children. He does
occasional merit badge counseling for the Boy Scouts, has served
on his town's finance committee, and is an eleven-gallon Red
Cross blood donor.